Referendums

Referendums provide institutionalized opportunities for citizens to express their opinions on particular policy issues. In democratic systems, referendums may be regarded as alternative channels of articulating citizens' views as opposed to representative mechanisms involving parties and elected representatives. There are, however, different views of the role of referendums in political systems. In Benjamin Barber's book Strong Democracy, referendums and popular initiatives were regarded as central elements of participatory democracy in which citizens themselves take the responsibility for their common political destiny. The most frequently raised objection to the use of referendums is that they allow incompetent and irresponsible voters to make decisions instead of the more competent representatives. Furthermore, parliamentary representatives have arguably better capacities for deliberation and, most important, they can be held accountable at elections.

When analyzing the role of referendums in political systems, certain institutional differences need to be taken into account. First, referendums may be used at different levels of governance. Apart from national politics, referendums are also used at the subnational level, for example, in municipal decision making. Second, in terms of their outcomes, referendums may be either binding, which means that the popular vote is the final stage in the decision-making process, or advisory, which means that the final decision is made by another authority, typically by a parliamentary majority. Third and most important, referendums have different roles in political systems depending on how they are initiated, that is, how the decision to hold a referendum is made, and how the agenda is set, that is, how the issue submitted to a referendum is defined. The initiation and agenda-setting procedures largely determine the extent to which governments can control the use of referendums.

In many countries, a parliamentary majority or the president may make a decision to hold a referendum on a particular issue. When this is the case, the incumbent government can usually control both the agenda and the initiation of the referendum. The terms optional and government-initiated have been used in the literature to refer to this category of referendum. Sometimes these types of referendums are only advisory, which leaves the formal decision-making competence to the representative bodies. However, there are only a few cases in which the representatives have made a decision contrary to the outcome of a referendum. Therefore, advisory referendums also tend to be binding de facto. Optional or government-initiated referendums have been used at the national level in such European democracies as Sweden, the United Kingdom, and most notably France, where the president has a crucial role in initiating referendums. These referendums have often been used to settle issues dividing governmental coalitions and parties, or to resolve problematic issues that threaten the electoral success of governmental parties or the president. In general, these kinds of referendums help to strengthen the position of those political actors—parties or the president—that are in office.

There are, however, also other types of referendums that are not as much under the control of the government and that, indeed, tend to limit the powers of the incumbent government. Referendums may be used as ex post checks on laws already passed by the parliamentary majority. Michael Gallagher and Piervincenzo Uleri have used the term decision-controlling referendums for [Page 559]these types of referendums, in which governments can control the agenda but not the initiation of a referendum. The first type of decision-controlling referendum is held because of a constitutional requirement for a referendum on particular types of laws, typically on constitutional amendments. These so-called mandatory referendums are used for all constitutional changes in Australia, Denmark, Ireland, and Switzerland, among other nations. In federal states such as Australia and Switzerland, constitutional amendments require a double majority (a majority of voters in the majority of states).

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