Revocation of the Mandate
The Revocation of the Mandate is one of the mechanisms of participation introduced to the constitutional reform in 1991 by the Constitutional National Assembly for the purposes of strengthening the channels of representation and democratization, in order to promote political and cultural pluralism, and to overcome clientelism, corruption and excessive centralization. The revocation of the mandate is defined by the Law as a political right, through which citizens express their willingness to terminate the mandate they have conferred on a governor or a mayor. In order to present a Mandatory Revocation, citizens must submit to the respective Registrar their request supporting the corresponding motivation and the required percentages of signatures not less than 40% of the total votes that the elected candidate obtained. The revocation of the mandate was initially introduced for all positions of popular election, although it was finally only adopted for mayors and governors. Approximately 134 revocation attempts have been made, but none of these succeeded either because of rejected and insufficient signatures, or because they were voted on but did not obtain the necessary threshold, or because they were pending voting or in the process of appeal, or because they were closed or in one case because the Attorney General dismissed the mandate before the vote.
Institutional design
Formalization: is the innovation embedded in the constitution or legislation, in an administrative act, or not formalized at all?
Frequency: how often does the innovation take place: only once, sporadically, or is it permanent or regular?
Mode of Selection of Participants: is the innovation open to all participants, access is restricted to some kind of condition, or both methods apply?
Type of participants: those who participate are individual citizens, civil society organizations, private stakeholders or a combination of those?
Decisiveness: does the innovation takes binding, non-binding or no decision at all?
Co-governance: is there involvement of the government in the process or not?
- Formalization
- embedded in the constitution/legislation
- Frequency
- sporadic
- Mode of selection of participants
- open
- Type of participants
- citizens
- Decisiveness
- democratic innovation yields a binding decision
- Co-Governance
- no
Means
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Ends
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