Here’s Kevin Harris on possible (!) legislation that would allow local people to vote on what form of punishment is handed out to convicted criminals in their neighbourhood.
Last year, the Swiss voted on whether individual citizenship applications should be ratified by secret ballots.
Commenting on this at the time, Alex Harrowell noted that referendums are not only likely to have highly illiberal outcomes, they also fail to produce clearer, more faithful or independent governance.
A blog about representative democracy, social media and a conversational politics. How will peer-to-peer communications change local democracy? How is representation changing? 
Too right. Either you have representative democracy or you don’t.
That doesn’t mean to say that the general public shouldn’t be able to have input in how policies might work, or indeed give their views on whether or not a policy should happen, but in a democracy like ours, the decisions need to be made by those that are elected to make them.