Forum Paper Title: Direct Democracy and Taxation: Averting the Double 'Truman Show'
Commentators: Professor Deborah Schenk, Professor Neil H. Buchanan
Abstract of Forum Paper:
The purpose of the article is to analyse the phenomenon of direct democracy related to fiscal
matters. This analysis will be based on the experience of a number of European countries compared
to one U.S. state, California, which was chosen due to Proposition 13, one of the classic examples
of antagonization between a state and its citizens. The survey begins by approaching an aspect, at
the basis of the frictions between the public apparatus and the people, which has often been
overshadowed. It is an element used by the common rhetoric to show off the value of direct
democracy against and at the expense of representative democracy: the failure of a trustworthy
relation that legitimates taxation, beyond the employ of the rough power. More than in any other
domain, in the fiscal area, which is poignant and incisive like any other within the private scope and
which founds one of the pillars of the state organization, it is necessary to forge a bijective bond; if
it would not be exactly comparable to the interpersonal trust at least it should foreshadow some of
its constituents and its role. Failing that relation – and yet on the assumption of its natural absence –
the politicians of several European countries have established, being soft, some paternalistic legal
systems in which direct democracy tools, even though provided, either had not the fiscal matter
amongst their objects or precluded it explicitly, as in the case of Italy. The reasons for the exclusion
were as much simple as trivial and easily challenged by the representative democracy’s contenders:
fear that the people could repeal the tax laws enacted by the legislative bodies, disavowing their
representatives and depriving the state of the supposed necessary funds for its running. The
California model seems somehow to back up those concerns, by revealing a dark side: that even
direct democracy tools often work with inherent pitfalls and shortcomings, held against
representative democracy. It is a question of partisanship, shallow knowledge of real issues,
manipulability. A Manichean attitude which imputes any sort of disgrace to the representative form
of government and exalts the purity and the originality of propositions and referenda – a stark and
genuine voice of the people – could be incorrect on both counts. The civics development, through
the several and various ways that also information technology permits, might succeed on
implementing the idea of an ‘active society’, theorized about 40 years ago, in which the spaces
between the public and the private lessen thanks to more awareness on the use of both systems by
educated citizens.
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