The Problem With Initiatives
By At this point, virtually the only initiative I’d vote for is one to get rid of initiatives. It’s not that the voters are bad folks, but they’re not trained or experienced legislators, so some of what they approve on face value ends up have subtle and negative impacts down the road. Happily, they seem to have figured this out, and are now rejecting the whole process as a tool of special interests. It’s a shame, because legitimate initiative drives are a positive option, but this sort of cynical overuse is killing the whole medium.
I am even more negative about referenda than Ezra, but it’s for a slightly different reason. It’s not so much that the voters are ignorant, although that’s part of it (and they’re quite right to have seen that initiatives are generally extensions of special interest politics.) The problem is that they’re too rational. Initiatives tend to undermine effective governance because they individuate the issues, which allows voters to get goodies without making the tradeoffs. The reason that California is ungovernable has little to do with bad faith on the part of politicians or “special interests” or whatever. It’s because voters have voted for tax cuts and various mechanisms that make it extremely difficult to raise revenues, and have simultaneously voted to lock in spending for all kinds of pet projects. And when you see the issues in isolation, that’s perfectly rational; looked at on its own terms without specifying what you have to give up, it always seems good to vote for any tax cut or spending increase. But in toto, you get what Michael Kinsley calls the “big babies” syndrome; voters want Swedish level of social services and Mississippi levels of taxation, and if that can’t happen “it’s those damned bureaucrats down in Sacramento with their fraud and waste!” And then you end up with stuff like California going from one of the best education systems in the country to one of the worst to ensure that wealthy homeowners pay fewer taxes.
So to the extent that anti-initiative sentiment is growing, I’m all for it. Representative democracy, which requires officials to make at least some of the necessary tradeoffs, is much better. (And nor are initiatives particularly good at generating nonpartisan reform; as was the case in California, “process” initiatives tend to be badly drafted and/or partisan, and it’s tough to sell process changes.) Nice to see the gas tax repeal–an intrastate version of red state parasitism–get voted down in WA too…