Seemingly endless campaign ads make it clear: Abortion will be on the ballot this November. This is true in a general sense, as candidates spar over the issue. But in some states, notably Michigan, abortion also appears in the form of a popularly initiated proposed constitutional amendment. There it will join proposed amendments on term limits and early voting.
In many states, including Michigan, ballot measures have addressed a multitude of issues: the minimum wage, funding for education, expanding eligibility for Medicare and legalizing marijuana. But just winning the vote is only part of the fight. In 2018, 65 percent of Florida voters supported Prop. 4 to restore voting rights to felons, but delays, confusion and restrictive policies on the payment of fines have blunted the measure’s true impact. “Letting the people speak” turns out to be no simple matter.
The stakes are evident in those ballot proposals that concern direct democracy itself. Arizona voters will weigh proposals to expand the legislature’s ability to repeal or amend approved ballot propositions. As one opponent argued, because “some politicians and wealthy corporations don’t like the decisions” the voters have made, “they are trying to rewrite the rules to get their way no matter what the majority wants.”
These fights are the latest battles in a deeper struggle over the meaning of popular sovereignty. The Founders came down squarely in the middle — or perhaps in a muddle. The Constitution included elements of both direct and indirect representation (the House and the Senate, respectively), but dictated that ratification would be done not by state legislatures but by popular conventions embodying “the only Source of just authority — the People.” But if the people were to rule, should that rule be direct or indirect? While some argue that this can be reduced to a sharp choice between “a democracy or a republic,” for the past two centuries the answer embodied in our political institutions has been both.
This built-in ambivalence has fueled waves of conflict, change and invention, including the mobilizations that established what we now know as direct democracy. By the late 19th century, there was a chorus of complaints that, purportedly, democratic institutions were no longer accountable to citizens. Repeatedly frustrated in efforts to advance causes ranging from workers’ protections to women’s suffrage, advocates advanced their case for new methods that would allow “the people” to speak directly in political decisions and protect the expanding powers of state government from corruption and capture.