Here, the majority sides with the minority

[the_macnab]

My opinion on legalizing gay marriage was like my opinion on smoking bans. Neither is an issue I can get passionate enough about to vigorously campaign for. Once they are law, neither is an issue that I will ever support removing. Yes, of course I support equal rights for gays; I'm just ambivalent enough about marriage that one's "right to marry"

Comments

[the_macnab]

The thing that's bugging me here is this: I agree with you, not everyone agrees with their representative on every single issue. If that's a compelling argument for referendum, though, then what is your argument for representation in the first place? I'm sure you realize that "I want my representative to vote when we agree, and I want to vote directly when we disagree" is not an argument for having representatives.

This gets back to that "bill of goods" idea. Representative democracy is fundamentally a trade-off, and is usually conceived as such. You don't have to debate every single bill, but the price of that is that your delegate may not have an opinion identical to yours. You get an imperfect expression of your preferences in return for a drastically reduced cost of political participation.

(There are two ways to interpret "representative." One assumes that the districts will be homogeneous and so the representative really can express the will of his or her constituents pretty accurately. The other assumes that the districts are heterogeneous but that they are drawn in such a way that the subsample of representatives will be a representative sample of the population. In that conception your own representative may not agree with you, but the share of representatives with your opinion will be roughly proportional to the share of the population with your opinion. In practice, neither of these assumptions holds well in the US today--but you are not objecting on either of these grounds.)

All of which is a long way of saying that, if you like representative democracy, then you need a more detailed reason for why you should sometimes have a referendum other than "the people should vote on some issues sometimes." An idiosyncratic list of exceptions or overrides of representative votes in favor of referendums won't cut it, because someone else may have a different list; pretty soon, you can assemble such demands for popular voting on almost every issue.