Abstract
The popular legislative initiative (PLI) is an institution that has gained ground in the last 30 years in Latin America. The analysis of this institution has been shared between constitutional law and political theory, but the demands of the latter, based on minimalist conceptions of direct democracy, have distorted, in a certain way, its normative-conceptual essence. In the following work, it analyzes the popular legislative initiative from a procedural perspective, taking into account its regulation in the Constitution and in the development laws in 16 Latin American legal systems. As a result of this analysis, principles are deduced that inform its procedure and that optimize the norms that regulate it, as well as a less radical typology and more consistent with the incidence of the democratic principle in this institution.
Keywords:
direct democracy; participation; popular legislative initiative; law; procedure