Introduction

Abstract

All direct democratic political institutions, which we will subsume under the term referendums in what follows, have the common feature that they in some sense allow the voters to make decisions ‘directly’, bypassing other political structures, channels and processes — in short, bypassing representative democracy. Taking in the consequences of this, one has to admit that referendums can be a very powerful tool. Nevertheless, referendums form a set of political institutions that are usually associated with only a small handful of countries, Switzerland and certain US states such as California being among the most frequently mentioned in this context. In reality, however, many more countries possess institutions allowing for referendums. In this context it is notable, too, that the wave of democratization in Europe in the last 15–20 years involved the writing of new constitutions foreseeing referendums as part of the new political set-up.