IDEA is an international organization working worldwide in the field of elections, constitution building, political parties, gender equality and development. Like Democracy International, IDEA undertakes some aspects of its work through empirical, fact-finding research: Both organizations are currently in the process of building a database, categorizing and fixing the state of (direct) democracy measures around the world.

In view of this common work we discussed approaches to terminology, whether to include undemocratic states in the database and difficulties in objectively capturizing constitutions. It became clear to us that a global network of democracy needs accurate terms and empirical facts to be able to clearly communicate with each other and to be effective. So this work is highly important. We hope that today’s meeting was just an intermediate step for more fruitful collaboration in the future.

Check out: IDEA’s database on Direct Democracy at www.idea.int/elections/dd/search.cfm
The Navigator to Direct Democracy, facilitated by Democracy International and the Initiative and Referendum Institute Europe at direct-democracy-navigator.org

Text by Cora Pfafferott