Where democracies like Switzerland draw the line on popular votes

A common sight in Switzerland: handing in the 100,000 signatures necessary to force a popular national vote. Keystone / Anthony Anex

Rules about which issues can come to public vote – and in what form – vary around the world, but they all reveal similar tensions at the heart of direct democracy, including in Switzerland.

The number 1,937 suggests Hungary is a direct democracy hotspot. From 1990 to 2020, it marks the total amount of initiatives and referendums launched in the country, a figure that should make it a champion of citizen participation. Yet most never even gathered signatures. Authorities deemed 93% invalid from the start.

In Switzerland, by contrast, just four people’s initiatives have ever been shelved as “inadmissible”, or non-compliant with the rules of what can be put to public vote – the last time in 1996.

What’s behind the difference? When it comes to what’s allowed and what’s not, both are extreme cases in Europe, from Hungary’s seemingly restrictive approach to Switzerland’s liberal one – not to mention places with no citizen initiative rights at all. They also raise more fundamental questions about democracy: how much citizen involvement is too much – and who gets to draw the line?

Rules stacked in favour of authorities

In Hungary, the second part of that question is crucial, says János Mécs, a constitutional law expert at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. Under Viktor Orbán’s government, in power from 2010 to 2026, courts and the National Election Commission were politicised, Mécs tells Swissinfo. “If the government was behind a referendum, they were soft, but if it was anyone else, they had impossible requirements.”

One requirement – that initiatives have to make clear what their implications would be – became in particular “a very flexible rule on which basically anything could be rejected”, Mécs says. For instance, a 2015 referendum against mandatory Sunday shop closures, whose invalidation Mécs describes as “ridiculous”. “Democracy is about deciding on public affairs. And if people can’t decide whether shops should be open on Sundays or not, this is a very undemocratic line of reasoning.”

Amid political changes in Hungary in recent years, there has often been more flag-waving than voting in referendums. Copyright (C) 2026 Civic Lens / Shutterstock. No Use Without Permission.

And the mistrust is not limited to Orbán, Mécs adds. “There’s a sort of elitism among many Hungarian constitutional lawyers that is sceptical about direct democracy and referendums,” he says. Whether this will change under new Prime Minister Péter Magyar is uncertain, he says – not least because it would mean overcoming years of what Mécs says is a “mutual lack of trust” between politicians and the people.

>> How trust can influence a democracy – and how Switzerland tries to maintain it:

Setting the limits

It’s also not just Hungary. Direct democracy is often contentious; politicians worry about losing decision-making power, minorities worry about being undermined. Many see negative sides of it: post-Brexit polarisation in the UK, for example, or the fondness of far-right parties for popular votes. In Switzerland, too, some wonder if there is too much direct democracy – whether in the form of “extreme” votes or recurring onesExternal link.

But how much is too much? Admissibility rules try to put a framework on this – but they vary widely. Beyond official rules around clarity, or whether initiatives can change the constitution or just laws, there is the question of what can be voted on in the first place. In some countries, for instance, entire policy areas like finance or national security are put beyond the reachExternal link of voters, explains Daniel Moeckli from the University of Zurich. “Such restrictions,” he argues, “reflect a lack of trust in people’s judgement and, as such, are hard to justify”. 

In Switzerland, by comparison, not much is off limits. “There were even votes on abolishing the army,” Moeckli says. Officially, the constitution lists three requirementsExternal link: initiatives must achieve “consistency of form” (they should be a general proposal or a specific legal text, but not both), “consistency of subject matter” (they can’t combine different policy areas), and they must respect “mandatory international law”, like bans on genocide or torture.

But in practice, only fourExternal link have ever failed the test: three due to inconsistency, including a proposal to shift funds from the military to peace promotion; one, a 1996 asylum proposal, was deemed incompatible with the international principleExternal link that prohibits sending refugees back to a place they could face persecution.

>> The rules and practices which the Council of Europe deems necessary for a well-held popular vote:

Why so few flops? It’s not just the comparative lack of hurdles, Moeckli explains. There’s also the fact that admissibility in Switzerland is only examined after a proposal has collected the necessary 100,000 valid signatures; in many other places, consistency checks – if not always compatibility with international law – happens before. This adds political pressure on authorities: “it’s hard to declare something invalid that already has so much popular support,” Moeckli says. And with most Swiss initiatives launched by political parties in the first place, it’s more probable their texts have been proofed by lawyers in advance.

Another key factor is who decides. In Switzerland, parliament makes the call, not a constitutional court (there isn’t one) or electoral commission. For various reasons, including political considerations and public pressure, “parliament tends to err on the liberal side and let things through”, Moeckli says. And there is no appeal option: “It has the last word.”

Borderline cases: minarets, burkas, asylum

But while it might be relatively permissive, the Swiss system of admissibility still comes up for debate. Moeckli questions the role of parliament, arguing it can be more concerned with an initiative’s “political desirability” than its soundness. “Admissibility is a legal question and should, as such, be decided by a court,” he says.

Borderline cases have also tested the limits of consistency in recent years. The 2014 “Ecopop” initiativeExternal link combined a proposal to curb immigration while promoting birth control abroad – “an obvious example where voters could be in favour of one thing, but not the other”, Moeckli says (voters ultimately rejected it). Other proposals from the right-wing Swiss People’s Party raised questions about international rights: initiatives to ban minaretsExternal link or burkasExternal link, expel foreign criminalsExternal link, or curb immigrationExternal link were all deemed admissible and accepted by voters, leaving parliament to try to implement them without harming international obligations.

More recently, debates have been revived by a People’s Party initiativeExternal link to boost border controls and turn back illegal migrants. In September, the government opposed this idea, saying it would be expensive and impractical, but it stopped short of recommending it be deemed inadmissible. In parliament, which will debate the issue before a national vote likely by 2028, the left-wing Green Party plans to question its compatibility with international law – but even among their allies on the left they will struggle to gain support for an inadmissibility bid, as Tamedia newspapers have reported.

Polarisation and stretching the rules

Finally, with admissibility rules open to interpretation, politicians – if not citizens – are often aware of their limits, and where they can be stretched. Political culture therefore plays a key role, not just in the outcome of referendums but in what reaches the ballot, says Ron Levy, a lawyer and political theorist at the Australian National University. With polarisation globally, “legitimate uses of direct democracy are shrinking, and its abuse is expanding”, he warns.

For Levy, such cases aren’t just limited to autocrats manipulating or stifling referendums. They can also be in established democracies, especially when there are no review mechanisms at all. In Canada, “secession referendums in Quebec, for instance, were intentionally misleading and confusing in the past”, he says. A federal rule about “clarity” has since been introduced, he says, but it remains “vague rather than technical”.

In his country, meanwhile, direct democracy is more vibrant at the local level, Levy says. Yet even there, some votes are inadmissible in a radical sense: in recent years, a few districts have held ballots on things not even within their remit, like fracking. At the national level, Australia shares the classic scepticism of whether ordinary people “can or should have a say on technical or socially divisive matters”. It also shares the trend that calls for citizen initiatives mostly come from a “newly ascendant populist movement”.

Levy says it’s difficult to guess how or if such calls for more direct democracy in Australia will be followed up in future – and if so, how strict or open the rules around its use would be. In the end, this is something all countries take different approaches to, based on history, culture and other elements of their system. Like direct democracy generally, rules on its validity are not universal.

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Edited by Benjamin von Wyl/ts