Author discusses forms of direct democracy envisaged by the Croatian Constitution of 1990 which defined Croatia as semi-presidential republic, before constitutional ammendment of 1997. Article describes normative regulation of referenda and speculates about reasons for their absence. One of the main reasons seems to be specific institutional framework and political consensus existing among the ...

What scope does a sub-national economy have to affect the level of inequality? Does a policy menu consistent with the theories of fiscal federalism provide for an ability to affect inequality measures, or does this ability require the powers of a nation state? In this paper we discuss these questions in the context of the debate around the Scottish independence referendum, in which inequality h...

This article examines political party behaviour around the referendums on the EU Constitutional Treaty in 2005. Starting from the presumption that this behaviour needs to be analysed in the light of the domestic government–opposition dynamics, a set of hypotheses on the causes and consequences of party behaviour in EU Treaty referendums is developed and reviewed for the EU member states in whic...

All modern democracies rely on representatives to formulate and administer policies. Representative government takes advantage of division of labor: a small group of experts can develop expertise in policy, freeing everyone else to pursue other tasks. The downside is that elected officials may fail to pursue the interests of voters. A popular remedy for the ills of representative government is ...

Canadian voters' reasons for following political events were assessed prior to the 1992 Constitutional Referendum and the 1993 federal election. Results showed that reasons reflecting identification were endorsed more frequently than those reflecting introjection, and distinctive patterns of cognitions, emotions, and actions were associated with the 2 types of internalization. Identification wa...

In a referendum conducted in the United Kingdom (UK) on June 23, 2016, $51.6\%$ of the participants voted to leave the European Union (EU). The outcome of this referendum had major policy and financial impact for both UK and EU, and was seen as a surprise because the predictions consistently indicate that the ``Remain'''' would get a majority. In this paper, we investigate whether the outcome o...

Abstract What is the role of referendums in different regimes from authoritarian electoral democracies to democratic systems? In this article we use Direct Democracy Integrity Index analyse Turkish (2017) and Italian (2020) understand if they can be seen as contributing majoritarianism or consensus democracy, depending on rules such who call a referendum integrity itself considering misuse inst...

This article contributes to the historical debate about two French referenda of 1992 and 2005, former on Maastricht Treaty (a feeble “yes”) latter Constitutional resounding “no”), by adding three further elements that passing time has revealed. First, new sources history European economic policies reveal role rise neoliberal policies, hence their major importance in second referendum. Second, p...