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A comment on Robots Rule at Swiss Factories as Strong Franc and Wages Bite. Parent comment

Re:Robots Rule at Swiss Factories as Strong Franc and Wages ... by pif on Friday February 17, 2017 @11:41AM (#13669561)
> Switzerland has a much more direct democracy than most (all?) other democracies.

Just for the record, that's not as wonderful as it may seem at a first look. Direct democracy has shown its limits some times during the last year. The fundamental issues being that you can only vote yes or no for a fixed text, while a law is usually supposed to be discussed in a parliament in every detail until an agreement can be found.

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Re:Robots Rule at Swiss Factories as Strong Franc and Wages ... by lukebuehler on Friday February 17, 2017 @12:30PM (#13670028)
As far as I know, a referendum can take two forms: either it's the final text or it simply is a mandate to create a law with certain parameters, the lawmakers can then decide on the exact wording.
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Re:Robots Rule at Swiss Factories as Strong Franc and Wages ... by ahakki on Saturday February 18, 2017 @07:53PM (#13677571)
There are two kinds:

1. An addition to the constitution. The parlament then has to implement that into law.

2. A referendum on a law that has been passed by parlament. This allows the citizens to revert a parlamentary decision.

There is no way to vote on a new law directly. However you can get close by just having a very detailed constitutional change that doesn't leave a lot of options for implementation open.

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