It's important to note that the word democracy comes from the Ancient Greek words demos and kratos, meaning ‘people’ and ‘power’. It originally meant ‘rule of the people’, or ‘rule of the mob’.
And it can come in many forms. For example, Communist East Germany’s official name was Deutsche Demokratische Republik. You might think it stretching the term ‘demokratische’ a bit. However, the founding Soviet myth was of bringing down the Russian Empire, an aristocratic regime that brooked little input from the commoners. You were fabulously wealthy, of high birth, or nothing. East Germany’s political class, by comparison, was astonishingly representative. Erich Honecker, the East German Leader from 1971-1989 (see Wikipedia for his actual titles) was a son of a coal miner. His predecessor, Walter Ulbricht, was trained as a joiner. They were people from fairly ordinary backgrounds, the ‘mob’, who managed to rise through the party ranks and exercise power.
However, the East German model of democracy is not desirable. There were significant restrictions on free speech, they suffered under a staid economy, and had pretty limited freedom of movement.
Democracy comes in many forms. Not every form is desirable.
You might think that the main problem with East Germany was that it was not democratic enough. You might also think that it's on the whole a good thing to make a state more democratic.
There are many ways that you might go about, prima facie, making a modern western democracy 'more democratic’. You could give children the vote. You could allow people to say whatever they want, to whoever they want, no matter how inflammatory or intimidatory. You might not want to, though.
Making a country ostensibly ‘more democratic’ is not necessarily desirable.
This is represented in some sense, in our modern western notion of liberal democracy. This notion has free speech, representation in government, right to vote, freedom of assembly and freedom from discrimination amongst many other ideas as central to any true democracy.
Often, these principles are in tension. For example, the right to vote comes into conflict with the right to freedom from discrimination whenever anybody votes BNP. We have to find a balance between the different fundamental principles of our liberal democracy.
A measure that appears to make a country ‘more democratic’, in the etymological sense, might not in terms of liberal democracy. We have to consider democracy in the round - in the liberal democratic sense.
Referenda represent precisely this danger. They give citizens a powered-up right to vote - the right to vote on legislation, rather than the right to vote on those that vote on legislation. However, a powered-up right to vote, without significant checks and balances, diminishes the right to freedom from discrimination. A good example is the most popular petition on the new Government epetitions website. It calls for those who rioted during the recent disturbances to “loose” their benefits. It has gained over 80,000 signatures in just over a day. This is, probably, the majority public will. However, its implementation would, in my opinion, diminish the strength of our democracy.
A right to referenda, even given certain checks and balances, would make us less democratic, not more.
And furthermore, there are things that matter other than how democratic we are as a nation. We value justice, happiness, relationships and much much more. I believe that a blanket right to referenda diminishes all of these things. So the next time somebody espouses referenda as the über-democratic solution to all our problems, don’t feel somewhat guilty for not agreeing (although I usually still do). Tell ‘em their definition of democracy is flawed - they are thinking of democracy in the pure, etymological sense, and not the liberal democratic sense - and that there are things other than democracy that matter too.
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