In the weeks since Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and his Republican allies passed a controversial "budget repair bill" that eliminated the rights of public sector workers to collectively bargain, activists on both sides of the aisle have been feverishly trying to collect enough signatures to trigger recall elections against the officials involved. Republicans hope to recall several of the Democratic state senators who left the state in an effort to stall the bill, and Democrats hope to recall enough Republican state senators to regain control of the chamber and scuttle all of the governor's future legislative initiatives. Walker's bill was probably just a cynical attempt to bust unions in order to weaken the state's Democratic Party, and he and all of his cronies deserve whatever they get. Even still, citizen-led direct democracy efforts like these are overwhelmingly bad for the country and should never be used so liberally.
Recall elections allow voters to first choose whether or not to fire elected officials, and then choose who to replace them with. Like ballot initiatives and voter referendums, they allow voters to circumvent their elected officials to directly influence state policy. These types of procedures popped up around the country in the late 1800s to allow citizens to defend themselves from the endemic corruption caused by bribes from big business interests like railroads and coal companies. Since then, the influence of such interests has naturally receded due to federal regulation and trust busting, eliminating most of the justifiable uses of such powers.
Today, direct democracy initiatives are mostly used by special interest groups that take advantage of voter apathy and disinformation to win favorable policies. In places where direct democracy is used prominently, this means state legislatures are working with a proverbial gun pointed at their heads. They wield influence over an ever-shrinking array of policy areas and are unable to even consider unpopular but sometimes necessary policies like tax increases for fear of mid-term voter retribution.
The poster child for this kind of perverse influence is California, where direct democracy has committed more than 80 percent of the state budget before the legislature has even convened. Beleaguered lawmakers are required to present a balanced budget every year without the ability to either raise taxes or cut wasteful programs that voters have written into the state constitution. This system has caused California to devolve into a public policy hellhole, an ungovernable nightmare where no politician, regardless of merit, can ever hope to effectively address the state's challenges.
Recall elections have the same kind of pernicious effect on electoral systems. When used frequently, they deprive legislators of a cooling-down period, insulated from the knee-jerk wrath of voters, to demonstrate that their controversial policies are effective. Electoral systems with the strong threat of recall face the same problems that plague the U.S. House of Representatives Congressmen are exposed to their constituents so frequently that they rarely dare to compromise or attempt bold policy proposals.
Such pressures defeat the very point of having a representative republic to begin with. Let's face it, almost none of us have the time or energy to adequately acquaint ourselves with the dizzying array of complex public policy issues that constantly bombard our nation. That's why we elect a class of professional legislators to make these tough decisions for us, and then judge them retrospectively based on the results. Robbing these people of the ability to do their job weakens, rather than strengthens, our nation.
Even in Wisconsin, where it's pretty apparent that Walker has seriously overreached, it's not at all apparent that these recalls will ultimately be positive for Democrats and union supporters. Walker and his allies promised that these draconian proposals would create jobs and eliminate the state's budget deficit. That's a serious promise to make, and one that should be empirically evaluated. If it doesn't work, such union-busting measures will be severely discredited and Republicans statewide will likely lose their re-election bids anyway. If it does work, Democrats will probably need to rethink their position. If these recall bids are successful, Republicans will still be able to recycle that argument in the future and this whole mess will have netted nothing. Either way, it's almost always better to let these processes play themselves out, rather than triggering the huge systemic risks of popularizing direct democracy.
