Direct Democracy in 1918 Massachusetts
More or Less Democratic?
(image from Oregon Secretary of State)
With an election looming in November 1918, the fate of Massachusetts’ initiative and referendum amendment was in the voters’ hands. Originally adopted in Oregon, the initiative and referendum generally reflected the concept of direct democracy — a system in which the people decide on legislation — rather than representative democracy. Although the proposed Massachusetts amendment addressed some of the deficiencies of the Oregon system, it should not be implemented because the citizenry is more prone to uninformed decision-making within a direct democracy system.
Granted, the final form of the I & R amendment did remedy the drawbacks of the Oregon System by including protections that ensured more checks on the concentration of citizen power. For example, the Massachusetts amendment to the state constitution could not entirely bypass the legislature: it had to receive at least a quarter of the votes of both chambers in two successive legislatures before it could be placed before voters in a state election, and then at least 30 percent of the voters in the election had to participate in the referendum for approval to be valid. In this sense, the Massachusetts amendment, to some extent, restored legislature legitimacy and prevented tyranny of the majority and perhaps tyranny of the minority. Moreover, the signatures of all I & R petitions also had to be “geographically distributed,” with no more than “a quarter coming from a single county.” This geographic dispersion, for instance, may help prevent situations in which legislation would be beneficial for one region (ie. an urban population) while being injurious for another (ie. a rural population). Lastly, a defect within the Oregon system was the lack of opportunity to “amend the proposed law after hearing and discussion.” To address this deficiency, the Massachusetts amendment designated the first ten signers of an initiative petition as a kind of a committee — which Joseph Walker called “proposers” — and gave them amendment power. If the legislative debate over their initiative revealed to proposers a flaw in it, they could decide by majority vote to add a “perfecting amendment,” with the amended initiative requiring 5,000 additional signatures to get on the ballot. Thus, the Massachusetts amendment did provide some checks on the concentration of citizen power.
In a direct democracy, however, the citizenry is more prone to making poor decisions as a result of being uninformed on specific initiatives. Critics of the Oregon system noted that in 1910 when thirty-two statewide initiatives appeared on the Oregon ballots, the pamphlet sent to voters “ran to 208 pages.” The ballot in Portland — listing candidates, statewide initiatives, and local initiatives — “was more than three feet long.” These pamphlets are extremely onerous for citizens to read and comprehend — thus making the citizenry less informed about each specific topic within the initiative. This is because the voter has the ability to vote on each initiative but likely not the capacity to thoroughly read and analyze each proposed initiative if the pamphlet lengths are long. Consequently, direct democracy includes the opportunity for citizens to vote on a topic on which they are not adequately informed on, resulting in detrimental and less productive outcomes. Consider an example from 1908 Oregon. Two competing groups of salmon fishermen on the Columbia River each put on the ballot an initiative that would effectively ban the fishing method of the other. The first method used gill nets downstream while the other one used fish wheels upstream. In 1908 Oregon, 53.4% of the electorate voted for banning gillnet fishing on the Columbia River, while 65.3% voted to ban fishwheel fishing on the Columbia River. Voters approved both of the initiatives, thereby “shutting down the state salmon fishing industry and creating a severe conflict with commercial fishermen from Washington State.” This disaster highlighted the inability of the people to govern themselves and reflected how an ill-informed electorate can hurt the stability of the state.
Thus, even if there are aforementioned checks on the concentration of power — such as debate from an informed legislature or checks via “proposers” — having a fundamentally uninformed citizenry in a direct democracy system leads to poor outcomes. The direct democracy system makes the process inefficient and onerous, which in turn decreases how educated citizens are about specific initiative reforms and therefore makes the citizenry more prone to poor decision making. Moreover, this amendment would be particularly detrimental if it were instituted in Massachusetts because the consequences of poor decision-making could permeate important issues such as women’s rights, labor rights, and immigration reform. Overall, instituting Massachusetts’ 1918 amendment should not be implemented because of the direct democracy system which prevents informed decision-making.
Sources:
Moss, David, and Dean Grodzins. “The Battle over the Initiative and Referendum in Massachusetts (1918).” HBS №716–044. Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing, 2018.
