The world has been watching California’s political and fiscal troubles, and the world is blaming our direct democracy.
So wherever there’s talk of expanding the rights of people to decide on laws or constitutional amendments, a new criticism ring: Let’s not let our country/province/city become another California.
I’ve been traveling around the country for the past week with Bruno Kaufmann, a Swiss-Swede journalist who is president of the Initiative & Referendum Institute Europe, a think tank on direct democracy based at the University of Marburg in Germany. He’s shared with me how California’s name is taken in vain in direct democracy debates around the world, particularly in Europe, where a new citizen’s initiative process is beginning to take shape. Bruno, political strategist Gale Kaufman, and I will talk more about this at a public event today in Sacramento.
Recently, the Peterson Institute for International Economics opined of the European initiative: “ Anyone who thinks this is a good idea should look across the globe to California, which has nearly a century’s experience with direct democracy and citizens’ initiatives, and which is lurching from one fiscal crisis to another and is probably the most ungovernable state in America.
As Europe embarks on its age of citizens’ initiatives, its leaders ignore at their peril California’s lessons on the trade-off between citizens’ legal empowerment and governability.” (The rest of the piece is available here). When Iceland had a referendum, the Huffington Post permitted an Icelandic journalist to criticize this as an example of the spread of the California disease.
California’s direct democracy needs reform, but the process has strengths. And it is only one factor in the state’s governance troubles. But the hard truth is that California has become a global synonym for the problems of too much democracy.
And so California’s initiative process has become a liability for those who wish to spread democracy across the globe. We need to reform our system not only for our own sake, but for the sake of the world.