Minors as citizens

Authors

  • Paloma Requejo Rodríguez

Keywords:

Participation of the citizenry, direct democracy, referendum

Abstract

Any attempt to promote direct democracy should understand that what matters is not the mere addition of some of the mechanisms that characterize it, but the way they are configured. The French and Italian examples of referendum are very significant. In both cases, under the appearance of change, is hidden the desire to perpetuate the classical representative model, in which citizens are safeguarded as if they were minors, either with a restrictive constitutional and legal regulation in the case of the French people’s initiative referendum, or with an expansive constitutional jurisprudence about the reasons for inadmissibility of Italian abrogative referendum, which greatly decreases its potential.