Direct democracy, properly understood, means that the masses have direct control over governance. If this were pervasive in social institutions, it would exist in workplaces as well as control over public affairs.
This means there is some organized base of people — in a neighborhood, workplace — and they come together to deliberate on issues that affect them, have discussions, and can decide the issue through their own direct vote.
Merely voting is not sufficient by itself. Direct democracy is participatory democracy and requires that people can participate, and have available the access to information and education, the means to develop their capacity for self-management. Direct democracy is about self-management — control over the decisions that affect you.
The objection has been that this can only apply on a relatively small or local scale. Advocates for direct democracy have developed delegate democracy as the way to extend direct democracy to larger scope. Delegates differ from “representatives” in the following ways: delegates are not professional politicians with huge staffs of their own, delegates derive from the same social circumstances as the people they speak for, live in the neighborhood or work in the workplace. Delegates must report back to assemblies of the base organization, and are expected to use decisions of the base to guide their activity. They can be removed or over-ruled through action of the base assemblies.
“Representative democracy” was an idea concocted in the 19th century when voting was first extended to propertyless working class males. It’s the idea that somehow government rests on the consent of the governed because legislators or governors are elected. But in reality there is no way to control what they do once elected. They don’t have to come to local assemblies to report back and we can’t simply overrule them or remove them through holding local assemblies.
The recent study by two researchers at Princeton showed what this is worth. They compared mass opinion to a series of 2,000 government decisions or policy issues. In almost all cases where the wealthy elite differed with mass opinion, it was the view of the elite that won out. They concluded that the power of the masses to get their favored policies adopted was virtually nil — unless they happened to agree with what the elite wanted.
