Två folkomröstningar i Palau : iakttagelser kring direkt demokrati

Kirjoittajat

• Dag Anckar

Abstrakti

Constitutional referendums were organized in the small multi-island state of Palau (Belau) in the years 2004 (six-part-referendum) and 2008 (twenty-three-part-referendum), and it is the primary aim of this study to find out to what extent these events in a less well-known and certainly underresearched frame and environment verify or rather falsify existing pieces of knowledge of direct democracy instances and features. While initiatives for constitutional amendments may in Palau originate from three principal sources, all but one of the 29 items in the two referendums in fact originated from the people (popular initiative). Findings are that policy issues were well represented among the initiatives and that the political culture of Palau does not therefore take distance to an aspirational constitution, that a very large portion of the popular initiatives were accepted in referendum and that the people therefore indeed decide in Palau on constitutional policy, that referendums on initiatives as a rule evoked broad majorities and therefore did do not polarize the electorate, that the item-wise level of participation was linked to a noteworthy degree to the placing of items on the referendum list, and that the long item list presented to the 2008 referendum probably entailed a fair amount of non-separable voter preferences, which may be supposed to add to the variations in response rates.