In recent years, political parties have been considered the main drivers behind referendums and getting citizens to express their views about highly important issues. The literature shows how political parties use referendums externally, to involve citizens, and internally, to involve their members in the decision-making process. However, we know little about why political parties would organize referendums internally and externally. To cover this gap in the literature, the paper focuses on two countries: Belgium and Romania, which were selected to increase variation on their experience with referendums, age of democracy and party system format. Each of these countries had experience with referendums at different levels, but in Belgium and Romania direct democracy is on a descending trend compared to Ireland. The study relies on 60 semi-structured interviews with political elites which were analyzed using deductive thematic analysis. The results show that internally the political parties do not use referendums because they prefer the hierarchical structure of decision-making and have low levels of trust in the procedure. Externally, some political parties support the use and have initiated referendums because they believe it is the only way in which they could reach as many citizens. The other political parties do not prefer referendums because the binding characteristic could not be fully achieved, the voting results might not be applied, the degree of information sharing among citizens regarding the consequences of voting is reduced and consider that referendums are polarizing if they are not handled properly.
