In this TJD-article we document all national referendum votes preceded by a collection of signatures from citizens (bottom up referendums). For each case we note who initiated the signature collection: the government or president, political parties in the opposition, civil society organizations.
Direct democracy can thus fulfill three functions in a political system: a) concentration or maintenance of political power, b) party competition, c) citizen empowerment.
In a nutshell, we present four empirical patterns:
1) Worldwide, the number of bottom up referendums is increasing, however, they were applied in only twenty countries (at least once).
2) Historically speaking, this particular mechanism of direct democracy has been used mainly by political opposition parties, however, over time the institution starts to shift into the hands of civil society.
3) Bottom up referendums are oftentimes considered to be the ‘good’ ones that are in a way ‘healthy’ for a political system. However, roughly ten percent of them fulfill the function of a power concentration instrument and are organized rather from top-down, thus perverting the instrument (hence the title of the paper). Especially in Switzerland with a governmental coalition consisting of four political parties it is necessary to organize a citizens’ initiative or a referendum from time to time in order to ascertain power and to be kept in the government.
4) On a worldwide scale referendum votes initiated by civil society organizations seem to have the highest success rates. Bottom up referendums initiated by civil society therefore seem to cover needs neither political parties in government nor in opposition seem to satisfy.
Uwe Serdült 
Red balloons, blue balloons, the Communists also gave their people two to three parties to choose from. Democracy is a hoax, a distraction to make us think we have power. Why wait every four years for some greasy politician who’s going to serve the rich anyway when we should be able to submit our own ideas and vote on them ourselves? Any time, not only every four years. For this reason I made a website http://arealdemocracy.org/ where people can submit ideas and vote on them. It can be broken down into regions, so the ideas and voting can concern only a certain neighbourhood, or an entire country, or a region of a certain kind of people that may cross several borders. We should be able to manage our own affairs without dictation from some capital city thousands of miles away. If people engaged in such discussions instead of letting themselves be brainwashed by the television or distracted by sports and the usual bells and whistles of society, they would feel increasingly empowered and we would move towards a system where the politicians would have to adhere to our decisions, or eventually entirely replace this archaic system.