Title: Introduction to the Debate: Do Referendums Enhance or Threaten Democracy?
Abstract: Within the last two and a half years, citizens of Great Britain cast their ballot to decide on Brexit; Italians held a popular vote on whether to reform their political institutions; Swiss voters decided on the public media financing plan; and Irish nationals voted on marriage and abortion regulations. In addition to this “referendum madness” (The Economist 2016), an increasing number of political actors are calling for introducing provisions for so-called direct democratic procedures in existing representative democracies. As commentators have noted, “it looks like there will be no going back on the use of referendums” (Renwick 2017). Yet democratic theory does little to inform debates about the desirability of these processes. We suggest that this gap is due, at least in part, to the fact that democratic theorists generally consider “referendums” as a homogeneous category of political processes. Focusing on the popular vote moment only, they ignore that the processes preceding these votes greatly differ. The fact that Brexit was a top-down referendum, whereas the Italian Constitutional referendum was a bottom-up referendum, the Swiss vote a popular initiative, and the Irish votes, mandatory referendums – which means, among other things, that the processes were triggered by different actors, were about different kinds of texts, and led to more or less binding decisions – remains too often concealed in normative discussions. This gap contrasts with recent developments in democratic theory that focus on questions about how best to implement democratic processes such as mini-publics to enhance democratic systems (see e.g., Ferejohn 2000; Smith 2009; Warren and Pearse 2008). To be sure, proposals have been made to sequence or couple undifferentiated “referendum” mechanisms with other institutional devices to enhance their quality (Gastil and Richards 2013; Saward 2001). But democratic theory has remained largely silent about how best to institutionalize these processes in the first place so they enhance rather than undermine democratic systems (rare exceptions include Lacey 2017; Setälä 2006; Tierney 2012). The aim of this Debate is to remedy this situation by launching a normative discussion about the institutional design of popular vote processes. Leaving the question of whether these processes should at all take place in democratic systems behind, we start from the facts (i) that these processes are part of the repertoire of democratic processes of existing democratic systems and (ii) that they are implemented through a variety of institutional designs, which empirical research has shown influence the kind of impact these processes have on democratic systems. This new starting point raises a range of largely unexplored normative questions: in order to best contribute to democratic systems, should referendums and initiatives be triggered by elected representatives or by nonelected actors? What kind of issues should be voted on? How many options should voters have on their ballots? Should the result of the vote be consultative or binding? The present Debate offers elements of answer to these and other related questions. It has two particularities that we wish to highlight here. First, in order to remain coherent and concise, the Debate centers on referendum processes, namely popular vote processes that involve a popular vote on texts proposed or adopted by elected representatives. We leave popular initiatives, which entail popular votes on texts proposed by citizens or nonelected organizations, for future discussions. Referendum processes vary along numerous lines of variations, which are presented and discussed in the contributions to this Debate and summed up in a systematic way in the final essay. The insights gathered here, which reflect a diversity of approaches, demonstrate the importance of attending to questions of institutional design when asking whether referendums enhance or undermine democratic systems. Second, in order to enable a form of discussion among the contributors, we organized this Debate in three consecutive phases that took place in the Spring of 2018. We first invited Simone Chambers, Richard Bellamy, and Hélène Landemore, our “first round” of respondents, to comment on a short article in which we suggest that referendums can enhance democratic systems when they are bottom-up and binding. Our “second round” of respondents, namely Spencer McKay, Daniel Moeckli, and Antoine Chollet, were then invited to comment on both our article and the first round of responses. We took the opportunity to reflect on some of the valuable insights of this discussion in a final answer and to offer considerations to help building a frame that can inform future normative thinking about the design of popular vote processes. It should thus be clear to our readers that, because of the different rounds of this Debate, the contributors did not have a chance to respond to comments that were written in subsequent phases – a necessary limitation to the discussion. Besides, while each of the contributions to this Debate independently provides valuable insights to think normatively of the institutional design of referendum processes, it should be kept in mind that they are constructed as responses to other articles of this issue. We are very grateful to all our contributors for having agreed to engage in the present debate and accepted this unusual format. We hope it to be successful in opening the discussion and including readers in a reflection on issues that democratic theory has too long ignored. We wish to thank the editorial board of the Swiss Political Science Review, and especially Daniela Eberli and Thomas Widmer for encouraging us to launch this project and supporting us throughout the process. We are also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their comments and helpful suggestions on the entire Debate. Francis Cheneval holds the Chair of Political Philosophy at the University of Zurich. He is the author and editor of several books on democratic theory, history of political ideas, property rights and the European Union. Email: [email protected] Alice el-Wakil is a doctoral candidate and research assistant at the Chair of Political Philosophy of the University of Zurich. Her research focuses on democratic theory, and particularly on popular vote processes, institutional design, democratic innovations, and theories of representation. Email:[email protected].