Reclaiming the Referendum for Democracy

Written by Matt Qvortrup

Allowing citizens to request votes could revitalise democracy.

“The referendum in the people’s veto” wrote the Victorian constitutionalist Albert Venn Dicey. But, as I outline at length in my book Understanding Referendums, which came out this month, referendums tend to be Top Down. Rather than being a people’s shield, this particular form of semi-direct democracy is generally used as government’s sword. It need not be totally sinister. Typically referendums are held when politicians are dealing with a thorny question; one which they want to kick into the proverbially long grass for fear of incurring the wrath of an increasingly volatile electorate. The examples are to manifold to be cited, so a couple of examples will suffice. When the Conservative-Lib Dem government held a referendum on the electoral system in 2011, it was not because they wanted the people to be involved, but because a referendum allowed the to ‘agree to disagree’.

Likewise five years later, then Prime Minister David Cameron was not motivated by democratic idealism when he announced that he would hold the (for him) ill-fated referendum on membership of the European Union. Rather, this referendum has held solely to keep the then resurgent United Kingdom Independence Party at bay.

The problem with these top-down elitist referendums is that they decide issues that concern the political class, and not the ones that most people are interested in. At the time, less than 10 percent of the voters considered the EU to be a top-priority.

So, currently referendums are not serving their purpose of being the people’s veto. To be sure, they can perform this role when certain parts of the constitution are entrenched – to use a forbidding legal term. That is to say, when there are issues that only can be changed following a positive vote in a referendum. That there was a referendum on Scottish independence was in line with the ideal of the referendum as envisaged by Dicey. He championed the referendum because elections are too crude. To use the Scottish example, you may support the SNP’s social and economic policies, but disagree with them on independence. That roughly one-third of the voters of this party are against independence from the UK is a clear reason for having referendums on momentous changes.

But most issues are not of constitutional magnitude. Often there are issues on which people disagree with the government, but which are not submitted to a referendum. This reduces the trust in the political class, and even in the political system.

Can the referendum help resolve this issue? Again, as I show in the book, other countries such as Italy, Uruguay, and several US states have provisions that allow voters to veto legislation if they are able to gather a specified number of signatures for a referendum. For example, when Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi passed a law under which no sitting head of government could be put on trial, the required 500.000 citizens signed a petition to hold a referendum. The law was duly nullified after 90 percent voted for this in a referendum.

The Italian provision for what is called il referendum abrogativo – like similar provisions in Uruguay – provide a mechanism by which the referendum can serve a function of a people’s veto. Indeed, in the latter country, a vote was held on a particularly severe austerity package. The consequences were not drastic or dramatic. The sky did not fall in. But Uruguay is now one of the best governed countries in Latin America – if not the world.

The claim that more referendums by the people would lead to populism and chaos is not borne out by facts. Places like Switzerland and California are hardly basket cases let alone banana republics.

But this is not the only way in which a referendum can improve upon representative democracy. Another provision – albeit one less often used – is to allow the people to decide in case of a conflict between the two chambers of parliament.

At the moment the House of Lords will face calls for its abolition if it goes against the will of the House of Commons. But suppose that a referendum could be held as a kind of democratic tie-brake if the Upper House were to oppose assisted dying or the use of AI (both examples before their Lordships at the moment)?

For some referendums got a bad rep after the Brexit vote. That is not the fault of the institution but a result of it being abused by the politicians. The overall finding in my book is that referendums tend to be misused. It is time to reclaim the referendum as a truly democratic mechanism. That can only be done if we give the people the right to initiate them. For referendums to be a force for democratic legitimacy they must be reclaimed by the people.

Professor Matt Qvortrup is author of the Edward Elgar Book Understanding Referendums, The Comparative Politics of Direct Democracy. He is a Senior Research Fellow at the Australian National University.