Germany’s no-emotion voting guide surges despite campaign of personalities

Historically it’s more likely than not that promises are kept. (That this isn’t the case is mostly dumb propaganda.) The biggest wrinkle to this is that Germany has coalition governments, so no one party can implement their whole election program.

What is and isn’t done isn’t random, though, and you will find different parties putting a different emphasis one different things. For example, I’m certain that the Greens would drop a great many of their policies on anything except climate if they were elected. However, it’s not as though that emphasis is exactly surprising.

Other than that Wahl-o-Mat is an obviously imperfect tool trying to somewhat simplify something very complex. Which is valuable.

We lost the capability to make and accept compromises.

The only one thing, that is truly additional relevant indicator: Are the parties/parliamentarian transparent and free of corruption/lobbyism.

The main reasons: First, direct democracy is very vulnerable to populism. Easy slogans that prey on emotions are prone to win against more realistic attitudes. Second, it's very easy to manipulate direct voting. The way you ask can practically determine the outcome. We know that from opinion polls where seemingly very similar questions can lead to totally different results, based on small details or how many choices there are. There are many ways to prevent this in opinion polls, but these would not work in an adversarial political setting. Third, many decisions require expertise that cannot be put into simple questions, and the general public will not have the expertise. In Germany, many members of parliament are surprisingly well qualified in certain areas like tax and defence politics. These are the "backseat" members voted in by party lists, not by direct election. Giving a direction and letting these experts figure out the details later works better than asking for concrete decisions that cannot be later corrected (because they are, as you say, legally binding). If you let people decide about the same issues directly, they will most often not even be able to distinguish between suggestions that are feasible and those that are imaginary. Again, the populist who provides the easy, though entirely imaginary "solution" can easily gain the upper hand. Direct democracy is also more vulnerable to disinformation than representative democracy. This also happens in party programs, of course, but the representative power structure kind of dampens the negative effects from it. Finally, representatives are ideally able to take on political responsibility (and sometimes indeed do), i.e., resign from their post even if a mistake wasn't their personal fault. No corresponding concept of political responsibility exists for the suggested technocrats. Moreover, once a policy decision is made, putting it into place requires a long series of more or less political decisions, too. You cannot just hand over those smaller political decisions to experts.

My 2 cents. Of course, this doesn't preclude discussing how much direct democracy one needs or wants. But I personally completely reject any suggestions for radical direct democracy (which every new radical party invariably makes for a while).