2010 Allmenn tekst
The ungovernable state
On May 19th Californians will go to the polls to vote on six ballot measures that are as important as they are confusing. If these measures fail, America’s biggest state will enter a full-blown financial crisis that will require excruciating cuts in public services.
If its representative democracy functioned well, that might not be so debilitating. But it does not. Only a minority of Californians bother to vote, and those voters tend to be older, whiter and richer than the state’s younger, browner and poorer population.
Those voters, moreover, have over time “self-sorted” themselves into highly partisan districts: loony left in Berkeley or Santa Monica; rabid right in Orange County or parts of the Central Valley. Politicians have done the rest by gerrymandering bizarre boundaries around their supporters. The result is that elections are won during the Republican or Democratic primaries, rather than in run-offs between the two parties. This makes for a state legislature full of mad-eyed extremists in a state that otherwise has surprising numbers of reasonable citizens.
What was unusual about this year’s deadlock was only its record lateness, which amounted to an “anti-stimulus” that negated much of the economic-recovery plan coming from Washington, DC, says Jim Wunderman, president of the Bay Area Council, an association of corporate bosses.
Representative democracy is only one half of California’s peculiar governance system. The other half, direct democracy, fails just as badly. California is one of 24 states that allow referendums, recalls and voter initiatives. But it is the only state that does not allow its legislature to override successful initiatives (called “propositions”) and has no sunset clauses that let them expire.
If a convention set out to rewrite the entire constitution, it would end in the usual war over hot-button social issues such as gay marriage or California’s fraught water supply. And there is concern that “the wingnuts are the ones who will show up, not the soccer moms”.
The Economist May 14th 2009 (abridged)
Lagt ut 28.06.2010
