Are direct democracy and parliamentarism really at odds? How do governing parties fare at referendums? Who reaps the fruits of opposition referendum victories? This book answers those questions and offers a new way of analysis that makes it possible to index and compare institutions of direct democracy and their use. By disaggregating them into a governmental and an oppositional type, referendums are at last integrated into the groundbreaking theory of Arend Lijphart. A study of 15 EU member states (Italy, Ireland, Denmark, France, Portugal, Sweden, Malta; Slovenia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Latvia, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Estonia) confirms correlations between the governmental type of direct democracy and majoritarian democracy on one hand and between the oppositional type and consensus democracy on the other. Indepth country studies, including a rigorous portrayal of 183 referendums between 1990 and 2012, give Models of Direct Democracy also high encyclopaedic value.