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Korean Central Government has adopted several direct democracy tools, such as the initiative, the referendum, the recall, etc., to promote democratization of local administration and to enhance responsibility and accountability of the elected local officials.
The local initiative system － an essence of policy making by voters' direct participation－ is an ordinance made by voter's petition. Researcher has explored that the outcomes of the system in Korea are not very successful. Thus, I have reviewed related literatures, and to compare to initiative system of the U.S. and Switzerland with that of Korea, I tried to build a typical model of the initiative system as a framework.
After the research, I was able to detect that two essential stages－campaign stage and votes by citizen－, and essential components of direct participation were omitted in the initiative system of Korea. The omissions causes serious problems such as (1)confusion of words between "initiative" and "referendum", (2)decline of the institutional effectiveness of direct democracy, (3)waste of voter's resources such as time and money, (4)lost of opportunity to promote local governmental capacity for policy making.
To solve the problems, I suggest (1) endeavor to understand accurate and typical initiative system, (2) amendment of Local Government Law which includes campaign stage and votes by voters stage, and includes components for actual direct participation of citizen.
