First, the $1 million figure is at the low end. Schrag’s book is eight years old now, but even then he was talking at least $1 million, and often considerably more. While that might be “chump change” in some areas of politics, it’s a significant commitment just to go out and collect signatures, before even getting something on the ballot. Anyone spending that much on gathering signatures knows that they’re going to have to keep spending to actually get the measure passed.
Also, i’m not sure where i said that the initiative process is one that only benefits conservatives, and only works to the detriment of liberals and progressives.
My point about the initiative process was part of an overall argument about California politics, but it was separate from my point about Prop 13. Yes, liberal and progressive organizations can get measures on the ballot. But the bigger problem with the initiative process is precisely that it places those initiatives largely in the hand of individuals and groups with access to a relatively small number of big donors.
Sure, in theory, if you can get a lot of people interested, it is possible to use a true grassroots movement to get something on the ballot, but in practice that’s not usually how it works. Generally, a few people, or an organization, decide that they want something, and they spend big money to create an initiative and pay signature-collectors to stand outside supermarkets and shopping malls to buttonhole people with well-spun arguments about why this or that thing needs to be on the ballot.
As i said earlier, these ballot initiatives were originally designed to protect the democratic process from the corrupting power of money, but with the number of signatures required these days, you need a whole bunch of money before you can even get the voters to think about an issue. It’s not that the process itself is always bad, or always produces bad results; it’s just that it’s no longer really serving its original purpose in any meaningful way, it has become captive to moneyed interests just like other political mechanisms, and it is often used to hamstring the legislature in terms of discretionary spending.
Of course, for some people, reducing legislative control over spending is a de facto victory, no matter what. “If we make them spend money on X, they can’t go and waste it on Y.” But the way it often works out is that we just get one self-interested group substituting its own priorities for the priorities of the state as a whole. It hasn’t eliminated self-interested pork-barrelling; it’s just moved it around a bit.
Also, your point about offering “a different proposition to the voters” is another problem, because it detaches these decisions from the broader compromises that are part of the political system. For all their shitty practices, legislatures and legislators are supposed to represent the interests of the people, and in voting for these folks we, the voters, need to consider the pros and cons of each candidate.
While an occasional proposition, on a really big issue, is a good and valid use of the system, we’ve turned it into a sort of political free-for-all, where anything that a bunch of wealthy and connected citizens don’t like about the political system can be fixed by an appeal to the demos. Plenty of Americans make a point of noting that this is not a democracy, but a republic, and that this means representative government, with all its benefits and failings. Resorting to old-fashioned democracy, where individual issues are put to a vote rather than left to the legislature, actually ends up making things messier while not really improving the situation. This is especially true because ballot measures are often even less likely than elections to reflect the broad will of the people, due to the fact ballot measures often only attract voters with direct and vested interest on either side of the debate.
My argument isn’t that initiatives should be eliminated altogether, but that they have taken over the political process in detrimental ways. A wise man once said that, like the filibuster, the initiative is a good idea that should be used rarely. I wonder who that was?
