Direct democracy at times referred to as pure democracy, is described as a system or democracy form where all the policies, laws and regulations applied by the government are initiated by the citizens or the people living in that sphere of influence. They are not made by the government representatives who have been elected into office by the people.  It authenticates that the court decisions, bills, and the laws in totality are voted to existence by all the country’s citizens. The paper provides a detailed description of why more direct democracy mechanisms cannot apply for the USA as a nation and the benefits and problems it creates to those who adopt it.

Direct democracy is not possible in modern nations like the American nation. It would be a huge step backward to more than 200 years back. Instead of moving backward the country need to focus on moving ahead by improving the democracies that the nation has to enhance its operations.  The existing system is much better because it has already highly separation of powers that provide better checks and balances.  The current system has many access points to check on the policies flaws and correct them accordingly. The federal level, local government, state level, the House, Executives, activist Judiciary and those coming from outside the government such as Academia, media, and civil society are enough to enhance the operation of the nation. The direct democracy was blindly initiated by our forefathers who were more concerned with the tyranny of the state and majority tyranny.  All this facet of direct democracy were not very pleasing and were muted because they were politically not correct as the mass could not be wholly trusted. Legislatures are better off since initiatives are the better tools of minorities and special interests. The direct democracy mechanism system would bring a lot of problems to the nation.

Benefits of Direct Democracy

It leads to full government transparency. Researchers have indicated that no other democracy form contributes to a high degree of transparency and openness as between the government and the citizens they lead. This is majorly because debates and discussions on significant issues pertaining to the country are carried out in public. Because citizens take a considerable part in decision making, they decide on what best for them and not the few with personal interests in the government. Therefore, all the failures or the successes of the country can be blamed on the citizens or credited to the people who voted it in and not the ruling government.

It also contributes to the intense accountability of government. The government through direct democracy and unmistakable voices offers the citizens what they vote. It would, therefore, tie the government to practice precision and a great level of accountability. In more direct democracy the ruling government cannot offer claims that it was not aware of or the will of people were unclear to it. It also eliminates the legislative process interferences by partisan political parties or groups of special interests.

Direct democracy ensures greater citizen cooperation.  In this system the citizens have got high likeliness to comply with the regulations, laws, and policies that they create themselves happily. In addition, people know that their personal opinions as the citizens of the country will make a difference in decision making in issues pertaining to the government.  Thus, they become more eager and enthusiastic to take part in government processes.

Problems of direct democracy

Direct democracy would lead to a drop in public involvement. Direct democracy only serves the people’s interests if the majority of people take part in it. A shorter time is always created for voting and debating in direct democracy. This is always contributed due to the urgent need for a change of the policy or introduction of a new mechanism of doing things. Such quick actions reduce the chances of public participation in the process hence reducing public interests. Decreased interests of the public mean less people participating in the voting and debating process.  Therefore the decisions made due to such quick debating and voting would not reflect the truth of the majority will. Therefore it only makes small groups of people with heinous intentions to have control of the government.

More Direct democracy would also result in a number of tense situations coming after each other. Due to the large population of the USA, this kind of system cannot work very well as it would create tensions among people. There is a high chance that due to the diversity of the American population most of the will not peacefully agree with or accept decisions made by other people. This is a significant issue with direct democracy as some of the groups of people, races or ethnic sections would feel sidelined by the system.  In direct democracy, the majority of groups always win the establishment of policies.  Thus it might create enmity and wars among groups of people from the minority to majority, and races to ethnicity.

The system of the direct democracy of the collection of signatures is a time-consuming process. It advocates that for the change of policies or introduction of a new policy requires a certain number of signatures from the citizens. This would take quite a long time to achieve.  The signatures also bring in biasness towards moneyed interest fellows. This is what damaged the direct democracy of California. It was found out that gatherers of paid signature and petition writers dominated this process of direct democracy.  Moneyed interests also took advantage because they had resources that the ordinary people did not have to carry out campaigns of media to support their interests.

Direct democracy leads to no decisions made. If all the Americans are required to vote on all the issues which are considered at every government level, the decision might fail. If all the issues brought forward by the federal, state, and local governments would be bought to citizens for voting, literally American citizens would spend all days and every single day doing the work of voting Direct democracy would also create voting by the unrepresentative subset of population hence contributing to biasness in the process.

In conclusion, more direct democracy mechanism is not possible with modern countries like the USA due to the large population and the diversity of the nation. Adopting the form of government would drag the USA to 2000 years back during the forefathers of the people of the USA. The system cannot be possible in the USA also because of the myriads of problems that it presents to diverse nations like America.  These heinous problems include a drop in public involvement in decision making, regular tense situations in the country, lack of decision among citizens and time consumption in signature collection. Therefore, the USA should not develop more direct democracy.

 
Do you need high quality Custom Essay Writing Services?