[myrion]

No, Switzerland is at most a semi-direct democracy. We don't vote on every last decision the government takes, after all - we have a bicameral parliament and an executive branch for those!

We just also have votations on a lot of things.

[Rochus]

> No, Switzerland is at most a semi-direct democracy. .. We don't vote on every last decision the government takes

Trotzdem nennt man das "direkte Demokratie". Wir hatten noch so etwas wie "Staatskunde" in der Schule. Die Jungen haben das heute anscheinend nicht mehr. Der Punkt ist, dass das Volk per Initiative etc. bei Bedarf eingreifen kann, also nicht nur dem Parlament aus der Ferne zusehen darf. Siehe auch https://www.eda.admin.ch/aboutswitzerland/de/home/politik-ge....

[hnbad]

You can call it what you want but even Wikipedia makes a clear distinction between a "direct democracy" without representatives and "instruments for direct democracy in an other representative system": https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direkte_Demokratie

Of course your "Staatskunde" lesson in school may have handwaved that distinction because the former by definition is stateless and the purpose is to distinguish between the Swiss governance model and other representative democracies, not doing a deep dive on all forms of governance.

We had "political science" lessons in school and they were largely about the structure of our own system (e.g. one exam literally involved adjusting the federal budget), maybe with some excursions to contrast it with e.g. the US but I don't think we ever learned about delegative democracy, let alone anarchist, minarchist or Marxist theories. Because it was a public school in Germany, the German model of the "social market economy" was never challenged and implied to be the best possible system because it is written into our constitution.

Saying a representative democracy that makes use of instruments for direct democracy is direct democracy is a bit like saying a social market economy (i.e. a market economy with a state-provided, limited, tax-funded social welfare system) is socialism. One may have political motivations to label it as such (either to make it more or less appealing) but it muddies definitions by conflating "pars pro toto", i.e. a part and the whole.

[Rochus]

It's a well defined and established terminology, regardless of opinions.

[hnbad]

Yeah, the definition is one of several and I explained why it's not a good one, regardless of how widely it is used. That you prefer this definition over others does not invalidate them - that's literally just your own opinion.

[Rochus]

See https://www.eda.admin.ch/aboutswitzerland/en/home/politik-ge...

[hnbad]

That's a website of the Swiss government calling its system of governance a direct democracy. I'm talking about political theory, not the Swiss government's publications about itself nor the Swiss curriculum for "Staatskunde" lessons in schools.

I understand that Switzerland calls itself a direct democracy. I understand that many other representative democracies refer to the Swiss form of governance that way. I understand that this language may even have ended up in laws and legal interpretations, but that doesn't change that "direct democracy" means something very specific (i.e. literally everyone voting on every issue, often in the form of proxy voting or delegation) in political theory. I'm not saying Switzerland does not offer more voter participation than other representative democracies. It is a lot closer to direct democracy than any of its neighbors or fellow European democracies. But it's not a direct democracy.

Think of direct democracy like functional programming: there are plenty of programming languages that were originally conceived of as procedural or object-oriented or class-based that claim to support "functional programming" and some are actually very good at it but that does not make them functional programming languages in the same way as languages designed as functional programming languages from the start. Switzerland started out as a representative democracy and introduced and strengthened its participatory instruments over time to behave more like a direct democracy (check out the PDF at the end of the page you linked, it even uses the same narrative of Athens and the French revolution used by other representative democracies to explain their origins). That does not make it a direct democracy, it just makes it a representative democracy with exceptionally good participatory instruments.

It makes perfect sense for Switzerland to describe itself as a direct democracy when it wants to contrast itself with all the other representative democracies because those instruments borrowed from direct democracy set it apart. But that's like Ruby bragging about being a functional programming language by comparing itself to Python and Java because Haskell and Lisp are not part of the conversation.