This is an auspicious time for those who advocate a more direct democracy. In recent years, petitions and referendums have captured the public imagination like never before. Last year’s ‘Oneseat’ campaign attracted the signatures of a million Europeans, each calling for the EU parliament to move permanently to Brussels. Edinburgh citizens in spring 2005 emphatically rejected congestion-charging after a city-wide vote. And February’s online petition against government road-pricing plans memorably won an unprecedented degree of public support.

But for this momentum to be sustained, a more formalised system of participatory democracy will be required. This is where Citizens’ Initiatives (CIs) come in. Setting the petitionary aspect of the above examples within a more formalised legal framework, CIs allow people to trigger a vote or procedure on any issue they want, as long as they can collect a given number of signatures within a specific period of time. UK politics has for too long been characterised by the accretion of power to the centre.

The system proposed for the UK by Unlock Democracy and other organisations such as the Power Inquiry is original both in breadth and scope. CIs would be available at local, regional and national levels. Not only would they permit citizens to initiate a ballot on specific topics; they would also include provisions for triggering public inquiries, as well as hearings into the performance of public bodies. The process would contain about three deliberative stages in order to ensure thorough consideration of each initiative. Crucially, additional provisions would be included to enable the reversal of unpopular decisions.

In Switzerland, Citizen’s Initiatives enjoy a pedigree dating back to the mid-1800s, and the situation there gives some indication of how they might work in Britain. Swiss law requires the signatures of 100,000 voters, or 1.5 per cent of the electorate, to force a referendum on national issues. One suggestion for the UK is that 2.5 per cent of any constituency (one million citizens nationally, or perhaps just 4,000 locally) would be sufficient for a proposal to be put to the ballot or an action to be effected. Naturally, signatures would have to be verified and collected according to rules laid down by the Electoral Commission.

Yet Switzerland is by no means unique. The introduction of CIs would bring the UK in line with a trend sweeping Europe and the wider world. Used frequently at state level in Germany, initiatives also play an important constitutional role in countries such as Lithuania and Poland, and in legislatures in the USA, Canada and Australia. In a significant number of cases, initiative results are legally binding, and this has proved crucial to their success. Where CIs do not gain the force of law – in New Zealand for instance – their toothlessness has convinced people that initiatives are an expensive waste of time.

To some, empowering citizens might sound like an insubstantial Third Way abstraction, but there is a strong empirical case for progressives to support CIs. Political scientists are finding more and more evidence to suggest that giving people a stake in governance has considerable socio-economic benefits. According to Professor Richard Layard, the economist who did much to inspire New Labour’s employment strategy, direct democracy has produced the greatest levels of public happiness in those Swiss cantons where it is practised most often.

This is undoubtedly a consequence of the initiative’s ability to reflect specific political or social concerns, even at a local level. Saira Khan – she of The Apprentice fame, now working for the CI campaign ‘Our Say’ – put it well in a Times article last year. ‘Who is better placed to determine the advisability of building a new supermarket on the edge of a town?’ she asked. ‘Local residents who have to live with the consequences of any decision? Or John Prescott, sitting in Whitehall?’. American ballot initiatives often affect how much citizens are paid or taxed, the public services they receive, the protection of their environment, and their social rights.

By encouraging similar popular engagement with decision-making processes, CIs would do much to reverse the democratic malaise of a Britain where political scepticism derives chiefly from negligible public ownership of the electoral system. Governments receive an electoral mandate in the UK once every five years or so. In the course of an administration, innumerable decisions with real effects on people’s lives are made by faceless civil servants. With so little to gain, what incentive is there for voters to turn out for elections?

The problem we face is not that the public is disinterested in politics – thousands marched for the countryside and against the Iraq war, and membership of campaigning organisations is at an all-time high. Rather, it is that such participation takes place in spite of, and not as a complement to, representative democracy. CIs were first adopted in the USA as a result of comparable dissatisfaction with the electoral status quo. The early-twentieth-century Progressive movement called for their adoption to tackle the influence that special interests were believed to exercise on government.

Other reasons for voter disillusionment include the deteriorating standards of contemporary politics. By cutting out the middle men (politicians), Citizens’ Initiatives could represent a timely answer to the sloganeering and obsession with personality that has long infected political discourse. A related feature of CIs is that they invariably bring more voters to the polls. Due to the range of initiatives on the ballot, and despite its lack of a competitive gubernatorial race, South Dakota recorded the second-highest turnout of any US state in the 2006 Congressional elections. The trend is mirrored in Europe as well. In an era of low participation elsewhere, Switzerland enjoys one of the highest levels of political engagement of any democratic country.

The Swiss also fair admirably in international surveys of voter satisfaction, and not just because direct democracy allows them to see the immediate results of their ballots. Initiatives seem to have a beneficial effect on the quality of political decision-making. Fearful of effective public censure, governments consult with citizens on the direction of policy far more regularly than they do in countries without CIs. Often the result is a centrist consensus: with no single ideology or interest group dominant, proposals are considered thoughtfully, and compromises reached.

This is not to suggest that initiatives are flawless. Having people vote on hot-button topics can be used as a force multiplier for intolerance much in the same way that initiatives raise turnout. In a cynical attempt to bring out evangelical Christian voters during last year’s mid-terms, Republicans introduced a scheme to outlaw same-sex marriage onto many states’ ballots. Powerful lobbies might exploit the system, as already occurs in American initiative states where companies are paid to collect signatures in order to push a vote on lucrative issues. And political parties might exploit it, too: witness the California recall election that ejected Gray Davis, the incumbent Democrat, and replaced him with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Critics of the system argue that CIs give undue legislative influence to populist – and perhaps even extremist – demands. But the happy experience of initiative countries worldwide should assuage many such concerns. Votes to bring back capital punishment have been defeated. Higher taxes have been approved, and soft drugs legalised. In the South Dakota mid-terms, a restrictive abortion law passed by the state legislature was overturned. Although citizens often vote along liberal lines, they also make conservative choices. The same ballot stymied a proposal to legalise cannabis for medical purposes and approved a ban on civil partnerships.

The point to note is that the public will was equitably represented by this vote, whatever we might think of the outcome. Unpalatable results from Citizens’ Initiatives may well prove their sternest test. Yet discussing these issues in the open – with all sides giving their opinion – surely beats the arcane horse-trading characteristic of modern politics. Nor will the adoption of CIs drastically change current democratic arrangements. Important technical decisions will still be made by bureaucrats, and political parties will retain their vigour (though party politics will hopefully lose some of its spitefulness).

To promote Citizens’ Initiatives is therefore not to advocate revolutionary change. Darlington has already organised a series of petitions calling for a referendum on directly electing the town’s mayor. The applicability of CIs to the existing constitutional framework is a compelling argument for their introduction. Despite New Labour’s devolutionary achievements, however, no government will readily give up control over the legislative process or executive procedures. While this means that reform may have to originate with the public, this is hardly a bad thing. UK citizens fully comprehend the power that laws – for good or ill – exert on their daily lives. Since public apathy derives not from a lack of interest in democracy, but from the notion that voting has little effect, giving away a small degree of power will yield large electoral gains for any government brave enough to try it.