Promoting Democracy through Direct Public Engagement: The Sri Lankan Experience

In this Direct Democracy Research Group’s working paper, the Legal Research Team at Verite Research, a member of the Asia Democracy Research Network (ADRN), finds that Sri Lanka’s semi-presidential system has several formalized mechanisms for direct democracy, including referendums, private members bills, public petitions, and parliamentary questions. However, they argue, statistics demonstrate that these mechanisms are being used inadequately and ineffectively. They highlight several key problems that Sri Lanka should address: that referendums are limited to national issues; that direct democratic mechanisms depend entirely on the discretion of the president and members of parliament; and that there are no institutional mechanisms ensuring government accountability. They advocate for a revised referendum system that allows citizen-proposed and local-level initiatives, a framework for compulsory parliamentary follow-through under certain circumstances, and increased monitoring of how these existing direct democratic mechanisms are being used.

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