The crisis of parliamentarism, the paralysis of many public legal mechanisms, the collapse in the functioning of some constitutional institutions, the degradation of the basic principles of constitutionalism substantiate, time and again, the need to search for the most optimal and efficient ways of responding to the challenges to Ukraine’s current constitutional and legal regime which are generated by our epoch. One of the opportune ways to improve the democracy system in Ukraine can be found in the instruments of direct electronic democracy, which are again on the agenda of modern politics and are actively debated by the public today.

This article was inspired by the author’s intention to demonstrate a cross-section of approaches to direct electronic democracy, which currently exist in the world, academic circles, among thinkers and practitioners involved in the introduction of democratic electronic instruments. The demonstration of the main approaches facilitates a more thorough comprehension of the legal nature of this complex phenomenon which originated and exists on the verge of constitutional law, political science, sociology, and IT knowledge.

The most important results of the study are the marking out and systematization of the main e-democracy concepts and their measurement in the constitutional and legal paradigm, given that direct e-democracy was generated by the Internet community as a phenomenon of digital society’s self-regulation; it was not artificially developed by constitutional scientists. Until now, direct electronic democracy has not found its clear indexation in the array of categories of constitutional law, and is now being developed and comprehended as a special form of political and legal regime or as its sub-type, a special form.

The main conclusions of this publication are that there is a need for and the expediency of the thought-through, step-by-step, properly developed instruments of direct electronic democracy in the practice of exercising the democratic constitutional.

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