New system of democracy – the model of Citizens’ initiative referendum claimed by the Yellow vests demonstrators in France

Upload: 8 June 2019, Last update: 9 June 2019

The democracy at this moment doesn’t work enough to reflect the citizens’ opinions. As Joi Ito who is the director of MIT media lab mentions that “I think the indirect democracy we know today has to change.”[1], it is time to shape and implement the new systems of democracy in a society. The more those new models appear, it would form the post-democracy.

One of the examples which can reflect more the public opinions is the citizens’ initiative referendum (= referendum d’initiative citoyenne/referendum d’initiative populaire in French) which hasn’t been installed yet in France, but in the movement of Yellow vests, the participants claim the necessity referring to the model of Switzerland.

Basically citizens have to assemble enough number of signatures decided in advance. According to the fliers spread by the Yellow vests demonstrators[2], there are four types of that referendum — “legislative” concerning legislation of a law, “abrogative” related to abrogation of a law, “revocatory” regarding “dismissal of political representatives”, and “constituent” is “modification of the constitution”.

For countries like Japan, this can be an option for their democracies since the current government doesn’t respect enough the voices of the public. Especially the recent Henoko landfill is one of the those cases.

I think the democracies in the future would be choosing not just persons as representatives, but more likely citizens make choices on policies such as laws they support. Supporting a person as a representative is harder. In most of cases just because a voter supports a candidate doesn’t mean that all of policies and opinions of the candidate is supportable.

A person is composed of various opinions complexly which means that there are some opinions of a representative a citizen support, but it is often found that the others are not supportable. In the meantime, politicians with higher skills of negotiations are necessary to have diplomacy in internationally and globally.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81uaRdwoF1c 2:08-. Accessed 7 June 2019

[2] In French they use the words “législatif”, “abrogatoire”, “révocatoire”, and “constituant”. https://www.giletsjaunes-coordination.fr/ressources.html Accessed 26 May 2019, “ricv3” Accessed 26 May 2019, “tract ric1” Accessed 26 May 2019, “tract ric2” Accessed 26 May 2019. “tract ric 3” Accessed 26 May 2019.