The direct democracy Wikipedia's page only talk about Switzerland. Is there any other nation that uses this system at the national level?
Edit 1:
In a direct democracy (DD), I mean a system in which the people really govern, and not just interfere with their representatives. Interfering isn't a characteristic of direct democracies, but of representative democracy (RD). In RD the population doesn't govern, it has merely the power to interfere with their elected rulers) [to interfere ≈ to bother, perturb, disturb].
In all RD, a certain percentage of the population (5-10% maybe, 99% definitely) has the power to interfere ―even if it's not written clearly on the law/constitution (the smaller percentage, the more "representative" would be this democracy: a system that requires millions of signatures to launch a referendum is less democratic than a system that requires 1000).
So, to be clear, implementing "instruments of direct democracy" isn't enough. All RD do this. Even in the worst dictatorship, a demonstration of several million people will have the power to interfere with their dictator.
This source states that the Swiss Confederation is [just] a semi-direct democracy because it's a "representative democracy with strong instruments of direct democracy". (Credit to Tilarion). But is Switzerland only a semi-direct democracy or really a direct democracy?
To answer this question, we need first to answer this one: where to draw a line between representative democracy and direct democracy? With that answer, we could then find out which nation is a direct democracy. {1}
Edit 2:
Pommy's answer both questions:
- is Switzerland a direct democracy?
- where to draw a line between representative democracy and direct democracy?
According to Pommy's, Switzerland is a direct democracy because the popular vote is final: it overrides the decisions of parliament
(Direct democracy outdoes representative democracy
).
Since we clarified what is (and isn't) a direct democracy, we can answer the question we started with:
Is there any other nation than Switzerland that uses this system at the national level?
{1: This question How does direct democracy compare to representative democracy? focus on whether direct democracy is better or worse than a representative democracy. So, my question is not a duplicate.}