[geofft]

California has statewide referendums, which are generally pretty awful: state law is (for better or worse) pretty complex, and referendums never handle that complexity well. If successful, they'll impose some requirement without much regard for existing law in the area, and certainly without any regard for future laws. They're heavily lobbied, perhaps more so than regular laws, because easy appeals to regular people's sense of how government probably works are effective, regardless of the accuracy. Referendums can't be overturned except with another referendum. And you can fairly easily have conflicting referendums, which has given rise to court cases about which one prevails.

Here's the Economist complaining about it in 2009: http://www.economist.com/node/13649050 I can anecdotally confirm that my reaction to most of the referendums, a few years later, was "How should I know?"

This is not to say that such an approach won't work. You just need some mechanism for managing complexity. That could involve trusted organizations that like-minded people delegate these decisions to (sort of a cross between lobbying/activism organizations and political parties), which could work very well or could just turn out like an actually corporate version of the current party system. You could alternatively try to limit the inherent complexity of governing, but that seems very experimental.