The Role of Direct Democracy in the European Union

Lars Feld and Gebhard Kirchgässner

No 1083, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: In this paper, the introduction of direct-democratic decision-making in all EU decisions is considered when it is feasible without prohibitively increasing decision-making costs. We start with the contractarian argument that each constitution is a contract joining the citizens of a state and requires as such the explicit agreement of (a majority of) citizens. Thus, the future European Constitution as well as future changes of it should be decided by the European citizens. After a discussion of the pros and cons of direct democracy, the ability of direct democracy to help creating a European demos is discussed. Consequently, we propose a mandatory (required and binding) referendum on total and partial revisions of the European Constitution. In addition, we propose a constitutional initiative, a statutory and a general initiative as well as a fiscal referendum for financially important projects.

Keywords: democracy; referenda; initiatives (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-reg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp1083.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Role of Direct Democracy in the European Union (2004)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_1083

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().