As someone that has lived in Switzerland for a decent bit now (but am not Swiss), I'm not sure this system makes a strong case for direct democracy working. I don't think the standard of comparison should be a functioning government, but rather some estimation of outcomes without direct democracy, if that can even be estimated. It's definitely worked well in some instances, and can be seen as not having worked well in others (in popular hindsight). The country doesn't even score as highly on a Democracy Index as several others [1], not that this is necessarily meaningful or conclusive.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index

> You make a good distinction there and perhaps politicians act as a bit of both. And I also think it's not scalable to vote on all issues that come up, that's why we have politicians full time. But for specific big issues direct democracy might work (thinking of Switzerland now).

Like Brexit?

Big issues tend to be complicated issues on many levels. I don't see how you can agree that full-time politicians are required because people don't have the time or expertise to be involved in every aspect of the political process, but also that for big, important issues - almost certainly requiring the most time and expertise to fully understand the arguments and ramifications of all options - suddenly the same non-expert people are suddenly better than full-time politicians.

What happens is Brexit. A ridiculously complicated process (the UK leaving the EU) that could be done in all kinds of different ways (in the single-market or instead in the EEA, in/out the customs zone, free movement or not, a Norway-style semi-in arrangement, tariffs, regulations, membership of other EU institutions and so on) each with their own trade-offs and complications, on top of the ridiculous difficulty of simply trying to predict the known unknowns arising from unpicking a 50-year political and economic union.

https://www.politico.eu/article/uks-brexit-options-explained...

Instead we got:

"Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?”

[ ] Remain a member of the European Union

[ ] Leave the European Union

where option two could mean anything, and in practise it let the Euro-hardliners and UKIP types define it as the hardest of hard Brexits and fuck the consequences. When it took years for Parliament to agree on the final result for what Brexit was (and the UK's system of government makes passing legislation easy ie. the govmt. has a majority in one house and can override the other house) it just shows how the idea that direct democracy fails at a certain scale. All nuance, complexity and context are stripped away and replaced by a single sentence asking a yes or no question that only shows people's feels over reals.

It's worth pointing out that the EU referendum was, legally speaking, only advisory, and therefore it was up to the politicians to decide how to interpret the result and act on it (or not).

The fact that parliament became gridlocked for years afterwards as it failed to agree a sane way forward is not a great argument for avoiding referenda and relying on the wisdom of elected representatives.

Parliamentary sovereignty means that all referendums are non-binding in the UK, but most people don't know that and wouldn't accept it - they only happen rarely, always ask about big topics, and so far have always been followed. Calling for a referendum and then ignoring the outcome is a sure-fire way to lose the next election!