How does Switzerland let voters decide almost everything?

Switzerland lets voters decide almost everything by giving them three standing powers. They must approve any change to the constitution. They can demand a vote on any law that parliament has passed. And they can propose a change to the constitution themselves. Referendums on the most important laws have been used since the 1848 constitution, and Swiss citizens are called to vote on all kinds of questions, from a schoolhouse to foreign policy, four times a year.

The numbers show how different this is. Between January 1995 and June 2005, the Swiss voted 31 times on 103 federal questions, besides many more at the level of cantons and towns. French citizens, in the same period, took part in only two referendums.

Yet Switzerland is not a pure direct democracy. It is described as a semi-direct democracy: a representative democracy with strong tools of direct democracy. Parliament still passes the laws. The voters act as a brake and as a starter motor, stopping some laws and starting some ideas.

The brake and the starter are deliberately hard to use. A citizen can challenge a law only by collecting 50,000 signatures within 100 days, and a proposed constitutional amendment needs 100,000 signatures within 18 months. Most proposals of that kind lose: only about 10 percent of the initiatives that reach a vote are approved. The real effect is often earlier, because a government that knows a vote may follow tends to negotiate a compromise first.