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The 2016 proposal to build an airport in Notre-Dame-des-Landes, the citizen’s initiative referendum during the Gilets jaunes protests in 2018-2019 and the shared initiative referendum in June 2019 rejecting the privatization of Paris airports all served to revive the debate on the combination of the representative system with mechanisms of direct democracy at the local level. Since the early 2000s, in fact, a number of participatory instruments have ostensibly been designed to enhance citizen participation in local politics. This research note investigates the communal referendum and how it has operated since the 2003 reform on local decisional mechanisms. The aim is to understand whether referenda help to resolve local conflicts or, on the contrary, highlight specific problems encountered in certain municipalities. The analysis of data related to communal referenda between 2003 and 2019 sheds light on this practice.