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Psychohistorian comments on Representative democracy awesomeness hypothesis - Less Wrong
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Comments (12)
The main problem with this analysis is that the "Bread and Peace" model you refer to applies pretty specifically to Presidential elections. Congressional (and probably all/most state level) elections are not necessarily determined by this (and indeed, I'm not convinced presidential elections are determined by this). This is particularly true when you look at high incumbency rates and the fact that seniority = power. Moreover, it centers around short-run well being with clear term limits (for presidents) - a president may be willing to make bad long-run decisions to get a second term. Much worse, if he's in his second term and the economy is going poorly, if this model is correct, then he's going to lose anyway, so he has an incentive to make the economy as bad and hard-to-fix as possible so that his opponent will fail and his party will win the next round of elections.
It's an interesting theory, but I'm not sure it fits the facts, and I'm not sure it suggests that indirect democracy is nearly as good as it is. Though it may be better than direct democracy, if only because of bargaining costs.
Also, on the note of California, the problem is not precisely that it has too much direct democracy, it's that it is too difficult to raise taxes. This is admittedly largely due to a single ballot measure, but it seems wrong to say that the problem is direct democracy when it would be more precise to say the problem is pretty much Prop 13). My theory is that it's simply dumb to allow any constitution to be amended by less than a 2/3-3/4 vote (which would also, conveniently, nullify Prop 8).
The entire post is based on hypothesis that models like "Bread and Peace" hold widely in most modern representative democracies. It would be delightful confirmation of my theory if it turned out it holds in successful ones (like Western Europe), and doesn't in unsuccessful ones (like Latin America).
As for the problems you mention. Even though president cannot run for third term, his VP or someone else from his party is likely to continue his policies, so the mechanism still works. As far as I can tell, presidential elections and national party preferences in congressional elections follow the same patterns, so if "Bread and Peace" holds for one, it should hold for the other. Incumbency preferences might weaken the signal, but as long as incumbents from successful parties have significantly higher changes than incumbents from unsuccessful parties, the mechanism works. Even if it only holds in swing districts, as long as safe districts are equally distributed between two parties.
California constitutional amendments are not really constitutional amendments in traditional sense, just a way to pass legislation by popular referendum. In theory requiring supermajority for referenda would be a source of a massive status quo bias, what would be extremely undemocratic.
California has a system for passing legislation by popular referendum. At least in the case of Prop 8, the use of the amendment process instead was to bypass challenges to the legislation's constitutionality. If we required a supermajority for amendments, but not ordinary referendums, it could stop the abuse of the amendment process to pass what should be ordinary legislation, subject to constitutional limitations.