> The only place where citizens seem to have an impact is Switzerland where with enough signatures you can request a referendum. Good luck implementing that in

> The only place where citizens seem to have an impact is Switzerland where with enough signatures you can request a referendum. Good luck implementing that in other countries. That "works" in Switzerland because Switzerland is an entire country with a smaller population than New York City. Even then, it doesn't prevent pretty horrible laws from passing in Switzerland, because a majority of the electorate can be convinced to demonize a minority pretty easily. Direct democracy like this doesn't scale up well at all, and we can look at California's proposition system to how that turns out at a larger scale.