When the Door to Democracy Is Open, Who Gets Through?

A citizen initiative begins with a simple promise. If enough people believe something should change, they should have a way to make that change happen. On paper, this promise can look straightforward. A law sets out who can initiate a proposal, how many signatures are needed, and what happens once the required threshold is reached. But what happens when people actually try to use it?

This question sits at the centre of my research on citizen initiative laws in Taiwan and the Philippines. Both countries have formal mechanisms that allow citizens to participate directly in political decision-making. Yet their experiences have been different. Taiwan's reforms lowered barriers to citizen initiatives and contributed to a surge in referendum activity in 2018. In the Philippines, many citizen initiatives that brought together religious groups, progressive organisations, and other actors ultimately failed to advance to a vote.

Drawing on insights from fourteen people across the two countries, including citizens, civil society organisers, and legal academics. What emerged was a story about what happens around the law. Who can use and sustain it, whether institutions respond, and whether people trust the information surrounding it. The central lesson was surprisingly consistent. A democratic mechanism can exist without necessarily being experienced as democratic. 

Accessibility has a ceiling. 

The first thing people notice about a citizen initiative is often whether they can get through the door. In the Philippines, that door can be difficult to open. National initiatives require signatures from 10 percent of registered voters, alongside a three percent requirement in every legislative district. One Philippine legal expert described the district requirement as “the real challenge”, because a single district can prevent an otherwise broadly supported proposal from moving forward.

In Taiwan, the story initially moved in the opposite direction. A 2017 reform lowered the national signature threshold from five per cent to 1.5 percent of eligible voters. One Taiwanese academic described what followed simply: “you see a boom and a very significant growth in the referendum” in 2018. But accessibility did not remain an uncomplicated success. A Taiwanese civil society practitioner recalled that the lower threshold was democratically appealing, but that too many referendums also became disruptive and politicised. Another interviewee described how a major opposition party began using the newly accessible mechanism to attack the governing party. The same opening that had allowed citizens to bring issues into the political system could also allow powerful political actors to take over the conversation.

Making participation easier matters; however, openness alone cannot determine whether participation remains meaningful. At a point, the mechanisms can become so politically contested that citizens no longer experience it primarily as a space for their own voice.

Presence is not the same as depth

Citizen participation does not sustain itself simply because organisations exist. The Philippines' 2014 People's Initiative Against Pork Barrel demonstrated the power of a broad coalition. Religious institutions and progressive organisations came together around a shared demand. Yet the campaign eventually struggled to maintain its organisational base.

Signature gathering became concentrated in a smaller number of churches and advocacy organisations, while public attention shifted towards the 2016 elections. One interviewee captured the wider problem by observing that political parties in the Philippines often exist primarily during elections. Another noted that civil society organisations often lobby legislators directly rather than using the citizen initiative mechanism.

Taiwan offered a different problem. Its civil society is comparatively dense, with networks connecting NGOs, student groups, neighbourhood associations and other civic organisations. Yet some Taiwanese advocates noted that they did not consider referenda an especially effective advocacy tool because bureaucracy and politicisation complicate the process.

A Strong civil society, then, does not automatically produce strong citizen initiatives. Organizations also need a reason to use the particular democratic mechanism available to them. Participation needs sustained organization, political independence and a belief that the mechanism is worth using. 

Will may matter more than skill

Perhaps the most striking finding concerned the state itself. It is tempting to think that government simply needs to be capable enough to administer a citizen initiative. Can it process signatures? Can it organise a vote? Can it follow the rules? The interviews suggest that this is only half the story. In the Philippines, organisers described difficulties with signature verification and local election offices that were perceived as unclear about how the process should work. One interviewee contrasted biometric voter registration with the continued need for manual signature verification. Another described the resulting problem plainly: “we don't really trust our government nowadays”.

Taiwan presented almost the opposite situation. Its election authorities were widely perceived as capable of administering the 2018 referendum efficiently. One Taiwanese citizen said the Central Election Commission knew how to check signatures and did so fairly quickly. And yet, when asked what the real problem was, the answer was not administration. “It’s all about politics.”

The concern was what happened after citizens had voted. Some referendum outcomes could be treated as consultative rather than binding political instructions. The state could successfully administer the democratic process without necessarily responding to what citizens had asked for. This distinction matters. A government can run a process while remaining unwilling to act on its results. For citizens, the second question may matter more than the first.

Infrastructure needs to work

Digital tools can make participation easier. They can help citizens organise campaigns and communicate with one another. But technology does not automatically create democratic participation. Taiwan's 2018 referendum demonstrated the extraordinary reach of digital mobilisation. Interviewees described information moving rapidly through social media platforms and student organisations. Yet one interviewee also remembered the same period as one in which citizens became overwhelmed by the number of campaigns and competing messages. In the Philippines, the problem looked different. The internet offered an opportunity to educate citizens about the initiative process, but interviewees pointed to fake news and misrepresentation as major obstacles. Digital access can expand the democratic space, but it can
also expand confusion. Taiwan's reputation as a digital democracy also hides another gap. One interviewee noted that the country sometimes presents itself as highly technologically advanced while many democratic procedures still rely on traditional, paper-based systems. Another said the digitisation of signature gathering was only beginning. Technology works as democratic infrastructure only when the infrastructure is actually there, and when people can trust the information travelling through it.

From measuring laws to listening to people

Taken together, these experiences point to a larger problem. We often evaluate democratic mechanisms by looking at what the law permits. But citizens experience democracy somewhere else. This could be in the queue where a signature is verified, in the organisation that decides whether to keep campaigning, and in the government office that decides what happens next. That suggests two practical ways forward.

The first is regular citizen-perception dialogues in which citizens, civil society organisations and local officials discuss recent experiences with participatory mechanisms.
These conversations could be held periodically across different countries, with their findings translated into short country briefs. The value would be in tracking not only whether a law has changed, but whether people's experience of it has changed. This matters because perceptions of effectiveness can shift quickly even when the formal law remains in place.

The second is a capacity-responsiveness diagnostic built around one deceptively simple question: when a citizen initiative stalls, is it because the state cannot act, or because it will not? The distinction can change the response. If the problem is administrative, the answer may be training, clearer procedures, or better infrastructure. If the problem is political responsiveness, technical fixes alone will not be enough. Taiwan's experience shows how a highly capable administration can still leave citizens questioning whether their participation has consequences.

The Philippines shows how administrative weaknesses can make the mechanism feel inaccessible before political responsiveness is even tested. Citizen initiatives are often described as the moment when ordinary people enter democracy; however, the more important question is what they find when they get there. A law can open the door, but it is up to the institutions in place to help guarantee that someone will listen on the other side. The lesson from Taiwan and the Philippines is that the work to ensure citizen initiative laws work does not end when the laws have their guardrails; that is simply the beginning of a long journey. It is just as, if not more, important to strengthen and create a civil environment that can sustain the proper use of citizen initiative laws.