Acceso usuarios
Carlos Garrido López
El uso del referéndum ha crecido exponencialmente en los últimos años en el derecho comparado y se ha generalizado en todos los niveles de gobierno. Y no solo donde ya estaba normalizado como cauce habitual de participación política, sino también allí donde había sido usado exclusivamente para consultar sobre cuestiones de gran trascendencia. Ello ha evidenciado que el referéndum puede complementar la democracia representativa, estimulando su representatividad y actuando de contrapeso. Pero también ha mostrado que no todo referéndum profundiza la democracia; que lo consiga o no depende de sus garantías. En este trabajo se analizan la funcionalidad de varias modalidades de referéndum y las principales garantías que cabe implementar para compatibilizarlas con la democracia representativa, especialmente la ampliación de los sujetos legitimados para instar su convocatoria, la exclusión de materias objeto de consulta y las exigencias de quorum y de mayorías reforzadas para conferir validez al resultado.
The use of referendums has grown exponentially in recent years in comparative law and has become widespread at all levels of government, not only where it was already normalised as a usual channel for political participation, but also where it had previously solely been used to answer questions of great importance. This has shown that referendums can complement representative democracy, by enhancing its representativeness and acting as a counterbalance. However, it has also shown that not all referendums enrich democracy: it depends upon who is asking, what they are asking about and under what conditions the campaign is debated. In short, it depends on its guarantees. In this paper I analyse the functionality of several types of referendum and the principal guarantees that can be implemented to make them compatible with representative democracy, especially the expansion of people with the legal authority to lobby for their calling, the exclusion of certain issues in referendums and the requirements for a quorum or for a qualified majority for the result to be recognised as valid.
