Vox populi or hoi polloi? Does more voting necessarily mean more democracy?

This article was published in The Economist 20 April 2011

People power has its perils.

In 2004, while tossing chunks of meat to his pet Bengal tigers, Saif Qaddafi (then seen as the Libyan ruler’s reformist scion) outlined to a foreign visitor his plans to convert his father’s rambling theory of direct democracy into a real political system. Something on Swiss lines would be ideal.

The particular ambition may seem risible now. Yet the general sentiment is common. The Alpine federation’s political system, in which citizens may vote 30-plus times a year in a mixture of local and national polls, is proving seductive for politicians and voters of all stripes.

Some Swiss votes are ordered by politicians, yet many, known as “initiatives”, are binding votes on national legislation triggered by citizens’ petitions. In recent years these have widened state health-insurance to cover alternative medicine; enforced deportation of foreigners guilty of serious crimes and benefit fraud; and banned the building of mosques with minarets.