Popular initiative
Based on Wikipedia: Popular initiative
In 1898, the citizens of South Dakota did something radical. They voted—by a margin of 23,816 to 16,483—to give themselves the power to bypass their own legislature entirely. If enough people signed a petition, they could put a law directly on the ballot. No politicians required.
This was the birth of the modern initiative process in America, and it would spread like wildfire during the Progressive Era. Oregon adopted it in 1902, and soon people started calling the whole concept "the Oregon System." Today, twenty-four states and the District of Columbia let their citizens write laws this way.
But here's the thing most people don't realize: there's not one type of initiative. There are several, and the differences matter enormously.
The Three Flavors of People Power
A direct initiative is the purest form. You gather signatures, and your proposal goes straight to the voters. The legislature never touches it. They can't water it down, amend it, or bury it in committee. It's democracy with the middleman removed.
An indirect initiative is more cautious. Your petition goes to the legislature first. They get a chance to pass it themselves, modify it, or reject it outright. Only if they refuse does it typically go to the voters. Think of it as giving the professionals one last chance to do their job before the amateurs take over.
Then there's the agenda-setting initiative, which is the weakest of the three. You can force the legislature to consider your proposal—to put it on their agenda and debate it—but they're under no obligation to pass it or send it to voters. It's more of a formal suggestion than a demand.
The distinction matters because words like "initiative" and "referendum" get thrown around loosely. In the United States, technically speaking, a referendum only refers to a vote on something the legislature has already passed. You're voting to approve or reject their work. An initiative, by contrast, originates with the people.
The Signature Problem
Every initiative process has a hurdle: you need to collect signatures from registered voters. The logic is obvious—without some barrier, the ballot would be cluttered with every half-baked idea anyone ever had.
But there's a catch that undermines the whole theory.
Signatures don't actually measure popular support. They measure money. Professional signature-gathering companies will collect names for anyone willing to pay. A billionaire with an unpopular cause can hit the signature threshold just as easily as a genuine grassroots movement.
Some reformers have proposed replacing signature requirements with reliable opinion polls. If fifty-five percent of voters support putting something on the ballot, maybe that's a better indicator than whether someone could afford to hire clipboard-wielding workers to stand outside grocery stores.
The exact wording of an initiative matters too—often more than the underlying idea. A proposal to "protect taxpayers from government overreach" might pass easily, while the same policy framed as "cutting funding for schools and hospitals" would fail miserably. The people writing the ballot language know this, and they craft their words accordingly.
Why America Has No National Initiative
Here's a question that might seem obvious but has a fascinating answer: why can Californians vote directly on laws, but Americans as a whole cannot?
The United States Constitution is explicit. Article One, Section One says that "all legislative powers herein granted" belong to Congress. Full stop. The Founders didn't include any mechanism for citizens to legislate directly.
To change this would require a constitutional amendment—and constitutional amendments are deliberately hard. You need two-thirds of both the House and Senate to propose one, or two-thirds of state legislatures to call a convention. Then three-fourths of states must ratify. The Founders wanted the Constitution to be stable, and they succeeded.
People have tried anyway.
The most dramatic attempt came in the 1930s. Representative Louis Ludlow of Indiana proposed what became known as the Ludlow Amendment: a constitutional change requiring a national referendum before the United States could declare war, unless the country had already been invaded or attacked.
Think about the timing. This was between the World Wars, with fascism rising in Europe and Japan expanding across Asia. Ludlow introduced his amendment repeatedly between 1935 and 1940. On January 10, 1938, it came closer to passing than any similar proposal before or since—but it was defeated 209 to 188 in the House, short of the two-thirds needed.
Had it passed, American history would look completely different. Would the public have voted for war after Pearl Harbor? Almost certainly. But would they have voted to enter the European theater against Hitler? That's far less clear.
Around the World in Initiatives
Different countries have designed wildly different systems, each reflecting their own political culture and anxieties.
Brazil requires signatures from at least one percent of national registered voters—but also demands that those signatures come from at least five of the country's twenty-seven federal units (twenty-six states plus the federal district), with at least 0.3 percent from each. This prevents São Paulo or Rio from dominating the process and ensures geographic diversity.
Uruguay goes further, requiring twenty-five percent of registered voters to sign before a bill can be submitted to the legislature. For constitutional amendments, the threshold drops to ten percent, but then the proposal automatically goes to a nationwide referendum. At the local level, only fifteen percent of residents in a jurisdiction can force their departmental government to consider a proposal.
The Philippines enshrined initiative rights in its 1987 Constitution—the document written after the People Power Revolution ousted dictator Ferdinand Marcos. To amend the constitution through initiative, you need signatures from twelve percent of all registered voters, with at least three percent from every legislative district. There's also a cooling-off period: no constitutional initiatives are allowed within five years of ratification, and no more than one every five years after that.
These aren't arbitrary numbers. Each threshold represents a political compromise between making initiatives possible and preventing them from happening too easily.
Canada's Lone Experiment
In October 1991, the Canadian province of British Columbia held a referendum on whether to allow citizen initiatives. More than eighty-three percent voted yes.
The result was the Recall and Initiative Act, which came into force in 1995. Since then, at least fourteen attempts have been made to either force the government to adopt a law or hold a referendum. Only one ever succeeded.
That single success came in September 2011, when British Columbians voted on whether to repeal the Harmonized Sales Tax—a combined federal-provincial consumption tax that the government had introduced to widespread fury. The initiative organizers had managed to collect signatures from ten percent of registered voters in every single riding across the province.
The tax was repealed. But the difficulty of that one success—the years of organizing, the province-wide coordination, the grinding signature collection—explains why no initiative before or since has crossed the finish line. The process exists, but the hurdles are almost impossibly high.
Europe's Cautious Approach
The European Union has flirted with direct democracy without ever fully committing to it.
The rejected 2005 European Constitution included something called the European Citizens' Initiative, or ECI. If one million citizens from multiple member states signed a petition, they could invite the European Commission to consider a proposal. Note that word: invite. Critics pointed out immediately that this was less an initiative and more a formal request that could be ignored.
When the Lisbon Treaty was ratified in 2009, it included a similar ECI mechanism. One million signatures from a "significant number" of member states—interpreted as roughly a quarter of them—can ask the Commission to submit a legislative proposal. But the Commission isn't required to do anything.
There's an important distinction here between a petition and an initiative. A petition goes to Parliament and says "please look at this problem." An initiative goes to the Commission and says "please propose this solution." A petition complains about existing law; an initiative proposes new law.
But both, in the European context, are ultimately requests rather than demands. Whether the ECI will ever evolve into something more powerful remains an open question.
The language barrier compounds everything. Organizing across twenty-seven countries speaking twenty-four official languages is exponentially harder than organizing in a single nation. The one million signature threshold is achievable in theory but daunting in practice.
Finland's Digital Experiment
Starting in March 2012, Finland tried something new: a fully digital citizens' initiative process.
Any group of at least five citizens can sponsor an initiative. They can propose either a complete draft law or simply a motion asking the government to draft one. Proposals are published on a government website where anyone can sign electronically. Paper signatures are still accepted, but the digital infrastructure is the backbone.
If an initiative collects fifty thousand signatures within six months, it goes to Parliament. That's about one percent of Finland's population—a meaningful threshold, but achievable for popular causes.
Parliament treats these initiatives like any other legislation. They can be debated, amended, sent to committee, modified beyond recognition, or rejected outright. This is not a pure direct democracy mechanism; it's a way for citizens to force items onto the legislative agenda.
The first initiative to cross the fifty thousand mark demanded an end to fur farming in Finland. Parliament rejected it. The first to actually pass was the "Equal Marriages Law"—the campaign to legalize same-sex marriage, known by its hashtag #Tahdon2013 (which translates to #IDo2013). The new law took effect in March 2017.
To date, twenty-four initiatives have reached the signature threshold. Twenty have been decided in Parliament. Only two have been accepted.
Those numbers tell a story. The initiative process gives citizens a voice, but Parliament still has the final word—and Parliament usually says no.
Ireland's Missing Right
Ireland offers an interesting contrast: a country with a long constitutional tradition but no initiative process whatsoever.
The 1937 Constitution that still governs Ireland has never included initiative rights. Since 2012, citizens can submit petitions to a joint parliamentary committee, which must formally consider them but doesn't have to act. This is about as weak as citizen participation gets.
When Ireland's Constitutional Convention examined the question in 2013, the members voted overwhelmingly in favor of allowing citizens' initiatives—eighty-three to sixteen in general, eighty to nineteen for legislation specifically, and seventy-eight to seventeen for constitutional amendments.
The government rejected the recommendation in 2015, arguing that the existing petition system was sufficient.
But Ireland did have initiative rights once. The 1922 Constitution of the Irish Free State—the document that governed the newly independent country before the current constitution—included them. If fifty thousand voters demanded a change in law, Parliament had two years to enact it. If Parliament refused, seventy-five thousand voters could force a referendum.
In 1927, the opposition party Fianna Fáil tried to use this mechanism to abolish the Oath of Allegiance to the British Crown—a deeply contentious requirement left over from the treaty that ended the War of Independence. They gathered signatures, but before the process could complete, the government amended the constitution to eliminate the initiative right entirely.
Politicians, it turns out, don't always appreciate having their power checked by the public.
France's Half-Measure
France added a limited form of local initiative to its constitution in 2003, but it's barely an initiative at all. Citizens can add items to their local assembly's meeting agenda. Whether to actually hold a vote on those items is entirely up to the assembly.
At the national level, France has something called the "Référendum d'Initiative Partagée"—a shared initiative referendum. Citizens can submit a law project to Parliament, but only if they first secure the support of at least 185 deputies (out of 577 in the National Assembly) and then collect signatures from ten percent of the voting population.
That's roughly 4.7 million signatures. The French political system is designed to allow citizen participation in theory while making it nearly impossible in practice.
The yellow vest movement that erupted in 2018 demanded a true citizens' initiative referendum—one that wouldn't require backing from nearly a third of Parliament before the public could even start collecting signatures. The demand went unmet.
The German Paradox
Germany presents a curious case: robust initiative rights at the state level, but nothing at the federal level.
Every German state allows initiatives. Citizens in Bavaria or Hamburg or Saxony can put proposals directly to voters. But the federal constitution, the Basic Law adopted in 1949, contains no provision for nationwide initiatives or referendums.
This is partly historical. The Weimar Republic that preceded Nazi Germany had provisions for referendums, and those provisions were exploited by extremists. The framers of the postwar constitution were deeply suspicious of plebiscitary democracy—the idea that the masses could be manipulated into supporting terrible ideas if you just asked them directly.
Whether that fear was justified, or whether it simply reflected elite distrust of ordinary voters, remains debated. But the practical effect is that Germans can legislate directly in their states while remaining purely represented at the national level.
What It All Means
The initiative process, wherever it exists, represents a fundamental question about democracy: do you trust the people to govern themselves directly, or do you believe they need representatives to filter and refine their preferences?
The arguments for initiatives are compelling. Legislatures can become captured by special interests. Politicians can be out of touch with their constituents. Important issues can languish for decades because they're not priorities for the people in power.
But the arguments against are compelling too. Complex policy questions don't always reduce to yes-or-no ballot choices. Well-funded interests can manipulate initiative campaigns just as easily as they can lobby legislators. Voters may not understand the full implications of what they're approving.
California offers a cautionary tale. The state's aggressive initiative process has produced some landmark reforms—but also a tangle of contradictory laws, budget constraints that make governing nearly impossible, and billion-dollar campaigns that treat ballot measures like any other product to be marketed.
Switzerland, often held up as the gold standard of direct democracy, has a different experience. There, initiatives are common, referendums are routine, and the political culture has adapted to incorporate direct citizen participation as a normal part of governance.
The difference may be less about the mechanisms than about the expectations. In places where initiatives are rare and difficult, they become high-stakes battles where everything is on the line. In places where they're routine, they become just another way of making decisions—sometimes good, sometimes bad, always legitimate.
What connects all these systems, from South Dakota to São Paulo to Helsinki, is a simple idea: sometimes the people should get to decide for themselves. The details of how, when, and under what constraints vary enormously. But the impulse is universal.
And given how many places have adopted some form of initiative process over the past century—from zero in 1898 to dozens of countries and hundreds of jurisdictions today—it seems clear that this impulse isn't going away.