Veto Initiative

In the second legal design, the competence to launch a vote is again open via the collection of signatures. But the competence to determine the voting issue is reserved for political authorities. Only existing laws or law proposals, which originated in the representative system, can be voted upon. This means that the citizens can determine the timing of a vote, but not the content. So, the instrument works like a veto option. Due to the open capacity to launch such a vote, it is usually classified as a bottom-up instrument. 

Such a mechanism can be found throughout the literature, though again with variations in the terminology: “referendum initiative” (Hornig, 2011a: 37), “popular initiative” (Morel, 2007: 1043), “rejective referendum” (Altman/Sánchez, 2020: 34), “citizen-initiated referendum” (Qvortrup, 2017: 146), “referendum” (Altman, 2016: 1211), “optional referendum” (Vatter, 2009: 128). In Moeckli’s concept for example, he speaks of a citizen-initiated referendum with a proactive version (our citizen initiative) and a rejective version (Moeckli, 2021: 6). In our typology, we call it veto initiative to indicate the role of the people and the main function.