Citizens’ Initiatives in Finland: Towards Inclusive Agenda-Setting?

This Paper analyzes the institution of Citizens’ Initiative (CI) in Finland from the perspective of normative arguments used to justify its adoption, that is, inclusion and equality in processes of political agenda-setting. The CI was adopted in 2012 as a part of the constitutional reform – it allows 50 000 Finnish citizens to make a legislative initiative to be considered by the national parliament. Already now, the CI has shaped Finnish political debate and parliamentary work in significant ways. The Paper outlines the institutional design features of the CI, describes briefly its historical trajectory and puts it in a comparative context as an instrument of direct democracy. One of the specific features of the CI is the platform for online collection of signatures provided by the Finnish Ministry of Justice (www.kansalaisaloite.fi), which enhances the accessibility of the initiative instrument. The Paper analyses citizens’ initiatives in the light of data from www.kansalaisaloite.fi and the Finnish National Election Study (spring 2015). We first ask three descriptive questions: 1) What kinds of topics have initiatives dealt with? 2) How widely is the CI used among the citizenry? 3) How do citizens perceive the impacts of CI on Finnish democracy? Second, we regress citizens’ use of the CI and their perceptions on it on standard socioeconomic and demographic variables and political activity. Based on empirical analyses, we discuss the potential of the CI to increase inclusiveness and equality of political agenda-setting processes.