World Democracy Forum

What is your blogger up to in Switzerland?

I wasn't sure when I arrived. At the invitation of Bruno Kaufmann, a Swiss-Swede journalist who heads the Initiative & Referendum Institute Europe (which is affiliated with a public university in Marburg, Germany), I was invited to a meeting of academics and journalists from around the world. A handful of journalists who arrived early took a tour around the country in the days before the conference. Now we're in Aarau, the first Napoleonic capital of Switzerland (it's a small city between Bern and Zurich), for the big meeting. Switzerland was the choice of site because more than 50 percent of all popular referenda and initiatives -- at the federal or national level of a country -- have taken place here. And Aarau has a brand-new center for the study of direct democracy.

There are 76 people here, representing 35 countries and five continents (There's no one here from Africa or Antarctica). What we have in common is that we write about, or study, direct democracy. Most of these folks are academics. Some of these folks are more activist than academic. They run institutes devoted to promoting democracy in countries that aren't terribly democratic. The rest of us are journalists in some form -- newspaper reporters, magazine writers, documentary filmmakers. Attitudes on direct democracy differ. A few speakers have offered some red meat blasts at representative government, others see referenda as essential to making representative government. The rule of thumb is: the level of love for direct demoracy here is inversely related to how much direct democracy you have. If you have it, you don't like it. (I'm in this camp). If you don't have it, you're excited about it.

This is being billed as the first global conference on direct democracy. A Greek political activist who showed up maintained that he held such a conference in Athens 10 years ago, and also suggested that direct democracy started in Greece, not Switzerland. The rhetoric got a bit heated, and your blogger thought he might see a Greek-Swiss throwdown. But the Swiss skillfully avoided war. Too bad. Neutrality is peaceful and boring.

We kicked off the conference Wednesday evening with a series of speeches from direct democracy observers from all over the world. I did a 25-minute on the United States, which I'll post here later. This morning, we divided up into panels on direct democracy in the Americas, Asia and Europe. I moderated the Americas panel, and had to break up a shouting match between panelist Mike Gravel, the former Alaska senator and presidential candidate who is a guest speaker (and the only other American here), and an Uruguayan political scientist. A few foul words were exchanged, with the Uruguayan bring up the CIA-sponsored coup in his country in the early 1970s... We're now moving into a discussion of voting technologies and methods. Tomorrow focuses on initiative and referendum in the European Union.

Why are we doing all this? The goal of Kaufmann and others of us (including me) is the foundation of an annual World Democracy Forum. The forum would be more than just an annual event to bring together people who write and study direct democracy. (Though we would have such annual events, probably beginning in 2010. That event, or a 2011 one, would likely be in San Francisco).  We're also talking about starting a global direct democracy journal. We also want to figure out some way to share -- and create -- data on the process worldwide, with an emphasis on best practices.

Will we pull this off? We'll see. Kaufmann is a skillful organizer with a great passion for the subject..