Problems of parliamentary democracy and direct democracy as an alternative

Introduction
It is no more too uncommon to bump into polls while surfing in the internet. Actually, most tabloids love to present polls to support their sensation seeking journalism. These polls penetrate all the areas of news and journalism: sports, entertainment, politics and even the economics. Should Chisora have won the boxing match against Helenius, who got the victory by unanimous decision? , Are judges giving too short sentences for rapists? , Should Germany resign from the euro? These are just few examples of the phenomenon. What all of these examples have in common, is that they are presenting the reader an interesting situation where he has the ability to include his own opinion to the opinion of the masses and see afterwards if the decision of an authority was it a boxing referee, court of law or a politician reflects the opinion of the crowd. Even though the polls are meant to work more as a tool to bind the readers to the newspaper or a website and encourage them to get involved in the discussion, and thus offer a kind of sense-of-belongingness to the readers, they present us interesting questions in the area of decision making: should the authorities reflect the opinion of the masses? , Are politicians able to do better decisions than expert or the crowd?, Should we have more involvement of the crowds in the politics? To address these questions, I will try the cover the fundamental problem of parliamentary democracy and the resulting conflicts of interest in this paper. Additionally, I will offer an in-

sight to one specific implementation alternative to the problem. The paper uses examples from the country I know the best, Finland. To bring the topic to the context of the seminar borderless leadership , it is good to explain something. Parliamentary democracy is nowadays the way the politics are made in many countries including Finland, Sweden and Norway. In these countries, president has relatively little power and the parliament has a lot. This means that the leadership in decision making lies on the parliament. I see the system nevertheless biased, because it restricts the power of the people and restrictions are against the principles of the borderless leadership.

Parliamentary democracy
We are not going to dive deeply into the history of parliamentary democracy. It evolved in England through the last decade of 17th century 1 and spread in the next century to France. The right to vote, suffrage, is a later phenomenon, and it was not before 1906, when Finland as the first nation in the world, gave also women the right to vote and run for office. Meanwhile, parliamentary democracy and suffrage has spread all over the world including countries like Germany, France, Spain etc. Nowadays, parliamentary democracy in Finland works in the following way. Everyone can establish a party, which is a group of people who think the same way on certain things, and everyone can run for office in the election (also without a party). People form parties to represent their opinion better. The parties decide on their program and candidates in the party convention where only the party members are eligible to vote. When the election comes, citizens who are over 18 years old are allowed to vote and choose their candidate.

Dietrich Schwanitz, Sivistyksen ksikirja: kaikki, mik tulee et (Helsingiss: Gummerus ;Ajatus, 2003), 141 145.

A rational person would vote for a person whose opinions and preferences are most close to those of the voter. Nowadays, it is very easy to see the preferences of the politicians in some common questions in the internet, and one can even use the election machines to answer a bunch of questions, and see then which candidates is the closest to his/her preferences. We can describe the situation with the a Venn diagram, where the preferences of the voter and the politicians are visualized with the colored circle. In this case, the voter would try to maximize the size of the our fit area. If the politician is elected, he will face conflicts of interest the first day he/she is in the office. If the voter is not aware of this conflict of interest, he might well be very disappointed when he sees his candidate choose other things which he promised before the election. Problem is that in the parliament for the newly elected politician it is very hard to vote as he would really like, because there is this thing called party discipline which basically means that the MPs are to support the opinions of their party and the administrative board of the party. If the MPs do not respect the party discipline, the party is able to expel him/her from the party, so being elected next time from the party s ranks becomes impossible. On the other hand, this makes it easier for the kingmakers and the financiers to use power directly and centrally to the board of the party. They don t have to convince and discuss with every single MP of the party. They can convince, in a way or another, party leader or the party board, and gain easily access to all the members voting rights .

The conflict of interest is visualized in the following picture.

Sometime it is not only a MP who deceives his voter. Sometimes it is an entire party. In the finnish system the party which receives the most votes will start to form the government. From the 200 MPs they need the support of 101, to make majority decisions. In this case it would mean that the biggest party, which reveices, let s say 25% of the votes and 50 MPs, must find at least so many parties that have 51 MPs to form the government. If the preferences of the parties are not the same (colliding party programs), compromises must be done. Parties must give up some of their preferences to get support to other ones. If some subject which was given up in exchange was one of the key parts of the party program which was marketed to the voters before the election, then the voters might feel themselves deceived. This results as a lack of trust and lack of respect to our politicians, and as a consequence, it might even lower the turnover in the elections people might think that it s better to stay at home than believe a politician and be deceived (again). But let s look it a little closer and take a hypothetical situation. In a land there s one party which receives 51% of the votes a ruling majority. Inside the party, 51% of the people are against a law, let s say abortion, and 49% is against it. In our example all other parties are

against abortion. In the ideal worst case, with the help of party discipline the 51% inside the party decides about the votes of the rest (in this case 51% + 49%). Because the party has a ruling majority in the parliament, in the end, they can introduce a law which has actually only 26% support of the nation s people. So basically the system allows setting laws on which 74% of the people of the nation is disagreeing. The problem becomes even more severe, when the turnout is smaller than 100%. In our example the turnout is 75% and thus the disagreement for a law can be as high as 80% in the worst case (all 25% who don t go voting disagree, party gets 51% of the votes in the election, 51% inside the party support the law, all the other are against it).

Direct democracy as an alternative

Direct democracy means, that instead of voting for candidates, the voters are directly involved in the decision process. Voters don t choose a politician whose preferences have the best fit to his/her preferences, they choose what decision alternative (a law) fits best to their preferences.

If the people are directly involved in the politics, many pitfalls of the parliamentary democracy fall away. People have more incentives to take part to politics, because their opinion really matters this time. Also, political parties are not able to abuse the system and implement agendas which might have no agreement from the majority. So abusing the absence of the people who don t vote is no more possible. Naturally, it is certain that a 100% turnover is not going to happen without a law which obligates the citizens to vote, but the arguments of not going to vote because of the fear of being deceived or because it wouldn t make a difference, lose their ground.

But let s face it. We are not willing to decide about every single law which is passed nowadays in our parliaments. Maybe we shouldn t dismiss the politicians after all! In Finland the expenses of the parliament were 86,7 million euros, so that makes 16,22 euros for a citizen2 annually. Most of us would be ready to pay 16.22 euros for not voting every evening for some
Eduskunnan kulut budjetoitua pienemmt | Talous ja politiikka | YLE Uutiset | yle.fi , n.d., http://yle.fi/uutiset/talous_ja_politiikka/2010/04/eduskunnan_kulut_budjetoitua_pienemmat_1591090 .html.
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law about things that the majority really does not care about. On the other hand, we want to ensure that if there s something important for us, we are able to decide, or if there s really something important where we see that the parliament voted against the will of the nation, we are able to use our power and exceed the power of our representatives. Such a model is being used in Switzerland. In Switzerland, government is formed the same way as in other parliamentary democracies. People vote for candidates who belong to parties. The biggest party forms the government, so that they have with their coalition a ruling majority. If they try to pass some law, which has no support from the opposition, or from the people, opposition can ask them to modify the law, until a consensus is achieved. If a consensus is not achieved, opposition may ask for a referendum, which means that the Swiss citizens go give their opinion about the law. They can let it pass or let it be dismissed. Consequently, the government is actually not able to make decisions which eventually please the kingmakers and financiers but not the people. Or as Theodore Roosevelt but it in 1912: I believe in the Initiative and Referendum, which should be used not to destroy government, but to correct it whenever it becomes misrepresentative

Conclusions
Falling turnovers in the recent elections mean that people are not content with the politics and the democracy nowadays. The movements like Occupy Wall Street and the demonstrations against the Stuttgart21-railway project reflect the crave for more direct democracy. People do not trust politicians and they have one of the least admired jobs in the society. Most of us are really fed up with the governments participating in megalomaniac billion dollar rescue packets, when we could solve some real problems with the same money (poverty, AIDS medication, science and education). Sometimes it feels that an opinion of a rating agency has more influence to the politics than the opinion of the people.

There are existing models and technologies which can help us through these dark years of democracy where the preferences of banks and global companies go before the preferences of the people. Good thing is that we have alternatives to the current system. The Swiss model of direct democracy is just one of them. The bigger challenge is breaking the existing the current power structures. Financiers, kingmakers and those who profit from the current system will make everything possible to keep their system running. Additionally, politicians don t want to take more responsibility and face the risk of being dismissed. The initiative must come from the people and people must take it as their goal to march towards direct democracy. A real challenge will be how can they accomplish a peaceful revolution using the existing mechanisms?