"Better" Rather Than "More" Democracy? Citizens' Perceptions of Direct vs. Representative Democracy in a Comparative Perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In light of increasing claims for a accountable political representation on background of what is perceived a crisis of representative this discussion paper examines citizens' perceptions of direct vs. representative It first provides a historical contextualisation by exploring evolution of process of reintroduction of direct democracy in modern era as a complement to representative and dynamics of comparative global trends in increase of implementation of instruments of direct These aspects are then correlated in a detailed comment on a recent comparative study of citizens' perceptions of direct democracy that demonstrated complex idiosyncrasies of particular European polities, but also important common characteristics i.e. prevailing support for direct democracy in all considered Western states and interdependence of citizens' perceptions of direct and representative as well as decisive impact of political representatives' attitude toward direct democracy on citizens' perceptions of latter.Key words: Direct Democracy, Political History, PostCommunist Europe, Path Dependence.1 INTRODUCTIONIn context of overall economic, financial, social, environmental and political crisis, public criticisms of representative democracy and claims for political alternative, essentially focused on reintroduction or reinforcement of direct democracy (in absence of new ideological and ruling concepts), have been made increasingly prominent and even put forward in recent protest actions and movements across globe. Although it appears that citizens are eager to take sovereignty back in their hands from their representatives, this eagerness not necessarily reflect neither a reaction to current crisis alone nor it is necessarily consistent with greater political awareness, civic education and readiness to engage in active citizenship practices in contemporary knowledge societies.This discussion on public perceptions of direct democracy vs. representative democracy will be based in part on a cross-national study by Bowler, Donovan and Karp that, while exploring citizens' attitude towards direct democracy in affluent democracies, also presents some noteworthy conclusions on citizens' perception of representative democracy.In a study that included 11 EU Member States (old as well as postCommunist democracies), USA, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Switzerland, authors demonstrated that substantial enthusiasm for direct democracy in studied polities may reflect what people find lacking in representative democracy as much as it reflects interest in a participatory version of democracy. Approval for direct democracy is therefore not coming primarily from people who are politically engaged and wish for more democracy, i.e. public participation in decision-making processes, but at least as much from people who are not necessarily interested in politics but feel a strong urge to control and correct ways representative democracy is currently functioning. The results of study demonstrated furthermore that the most consistent factors predicting interest in additional opportunities to participate are political distrust and idea that citizens must keep watch on their Government.Since collected data originate from a period prior to current crisis and authors of study only superficially probed into causes for detected prevailing citizens' position, I am first going to verify their argument on background of historical reintroduction and evolution of implementation of direct democracy worldwide aiming at a possible detection of path dependence indicators. Since authors explain outcomes of their study primarily by procedural varieties in direct democracy regulations, I am going to address these in comparison. Second, I am going to comment on outcomes of study done by Bowler et al. …
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".