Referendum Democracy

Transcription

1 Referendum Democracy

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3 Referendum Democracy Citizens, Elites and Deliberation in Referendum Campaigns Edited by Matthew Mendelsohn Associate Professor Department of Political Studies Queen s University Kingston, Ontario and Andrew Parkin Assistant Director of Research Centre for Research and Information on Canada Montreal, Quebec

4 Selection, editorial matter and Introduction Matthew Mendelsohn and Andrew Parkin 2001 Chapter 10 Matthew Mendelsohn and Richard Jenkins 2001 Remaining chapters Palgrave Publishers Ltd 2001 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act First published 2001 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). I S B N I S B N ( e B o o k ) D O I / This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Referendum democracy : citizens, elites, and deliberation in referendum campaigns / edited by Matthew Mendelsohn, Andrew Parkin. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Referendum. 2. Democracy. I. Mendelsohn, Matthew, 1965 II. Parkin, Andrew, 1966 JF491.R dc

5 For Jackie

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7 Contents List of Figures and Tables Preface Acknowledgments Notes on the Contributors ix xi xiii xv Introduction: Referendum Democracy Matthew Mendelsohn and Andrew Parkin 1 Part I The Rising Use of Referendums 1 Public Opinion and Support for Direct Democracy: a Grassroots Perspective Stephen C. Craig, Amie Kreppel, and James G. Kane 25 2 The Rise of Government-Initiated Referendums in Consolidated Democracies Laurence Morel 47 Part II The Impact of Referendums on Liberal- Democratic Institutions 3 Political Parties in Direct Democracy Ian Budge 67 4 Legislative Response to Direct Legislation Elisabeth R. Gerber and Simon Hug 88 5 Amending Constitutions through the Referendum Device Brian Galligan Popular Control of Referendum Agendas: Implications for Democratic Outcomes and Minority Rights Shaun Bowler and Todd Donovan The Medium is the Message: How Referendums Lead us to Understand Equality Avigail Eisenberg 147

8 viii Contents Part III The Impact of Referendums on Deliberation and Decision Making 8 Voters Decisions in the Nordic EU Referendums of 1994: the Importance of Party Cues Anders Todal Jenssen and Ola Listhaug Are Voters to Blame? Voter Competence and Elite Maneuvers in Referendums Arthur Lupia and Richard Johnston The News Media and Referendums Richard Jenkins and Matthew Mendelsohn Constitutional Referendums and Democratic Deliberation Simone Chambers 231 Bibliography 256 Index 273

9 List of Figures and Tables Figures 3.1 Variations in party interventions in popular policy voting between various systems of direct democracy Referendums and initiatives contrasted in terms of government control Frequency of popular consultations and strength of parties: postwar democracies and selected territories Distribution of direct democracy practices in terms of extensiveness of regulation and effects on political parties Level of conceptualization and factual knowledge by strength and direction of party identification (pooled data from Finland, Sweden, and Norway) Percentage of each group voting for the named initiative 198 Tables 1.1 Popular support for direct democracy in Florida, The cognitive mobilization and political disaffection hypothesis The Gamson hypothesis National referendums in 18 consolidated democracies ( ) National referendums by country, initiator, and period ( ) National government-initiated referendums by theme Typology of governmental objectives during 22 of 27 referendums Incidence of popular consultations and position of parties in 19 democracies and 51 selected territories: Existence of popular consultation related to strength of parties for 71 political systems Constitutional referendums 1901 to Variation in elite control over procedures for direct democracy 128 ix

10 x List of Figures and Tables 6.2 Popular approval of anti-minority initiatives and referendums in Switzerland and the USA Minority opinions towards direct versus representative democracy Proportion of members of ad hoc groups who are also party members Factual knowledge and assessments of personal knowledge on the EU issue % Level of conceptualization before the Nordic EU referendums of Determinants of Yes vote: parties and cleavages Change of party and change of EU position during the campaign Influence of party and ad hoc movements on the vote: percentage saying group was important or very important Figure 9.1 voters in low info, no short cut group Substantive differences between elections and referendums relevant to the media Distribution of intervenors as major focus of news stories Distribution of intervenors as minor focus of news stories Focus of stories News frames 228

11 Preface This volume is the product of a research project on referendums in liberal-democratic societies initiated and financed by the Donner Canadian Foundation. The volume brings together an eclectic mix of scholars from a range of countries with a variety of backgrounds. Although all have an interest in referendums, each comes at the question from the perspective of their particular area of the discipline of political studies. Taken together, the papers draw upon evidence from Western Europe, North America, and Australia and offer a consideration of referendums that incorporates insights from the fields of democratic theory, elections, public opinion research, the study of political institutions, and political communication. The result is a collection that advances the study of referendums by examining the various effects that the growing use of referendums is having on the contemporary practice of liberal democracy. The majority of the papers collected in this volume were originally presented at the conference on direct democracy, titled Maturity or Malaise? The Growing Use of Referendums In Liberal-Democratic Societies, that was hosted by the Centre for the Study of Democracy at Queen s University on May 14 16, The editors would like to thank the Donner Canadian Foundation for the financial support which made the conference, its associated activities, and the preparation of this volume possible. We would also like to thank George Perlin, the Centre s Director, for his leadership in making the conference possible. We are grateful to Cameron McCormick for his assistance in the preparation of the manuscript for publication, and to the faculty and staff of the Centre for the Study of Democracy and the Department of Political Studies at Queen s University who helped to make the conference a success, including Bob Burge, Fred Cutler, Evelyn McCaugherty, Shirley Fraser, Frances Shepherd, Celia Hatton, and Sarah Millar. All of the papers presented in this volume benefited greatly from the high quality of conversation that took place during the conference. In addition to those whose papers are collected in this volume, we would like to thank all of the conference participants, including those who acted as discussants, made presentations, or offered thoughtful commentary or intellectual support: Rick Arnold, Earl Bender, André Blais, Patrick Boyer, Catherine Conaghan, Pierre-F. Coté, Peter Cowan, Drude Dahlerup, xi

12 xii Preface James Davidson, Dorothy Ehrlich, Frank Graves, Andreas Gross, Janet Hiebert, Will Kymlicka, Lawrence LeDuc, Henry Milner, Will Robinson, Peter Russell, Peter Schrag, Hugh Segal, Leslie Seidle, Jürg Steiner, Alan Whitehorn, and Robin Wilson. This present volume is much improved because of their contributions. CBC-Newsworld broadcast a Forum on direct democracy that involved a number of the conference participants, and we would like to thank them for their involvement with the project and for helping to bring the issue to the attention of the Canadian public. We would also like to thank the authors themselves, not only for their contributions to the conference but also for their subsequent efforts in preparing their papers for publication. Matthew Mendelsohn acknowledges the Social Science and Humanities Research Council Post-doctoral Fellowship Grant # , which first afforded him an opportunity to think about the issue of referendums. We also thank Jackie Hesketh and Eleanor Allen for their intellectual and moral support in the preparation of this volume. MATTHEW MENDELSOHN ANDREW PARKIN Kingston, March 2000

13 Acknowledgments Chapter 6 Popular Control of Referendum Agendas: Implications for Democratic Outcomes and Minority Rights The equal co-authors thank Liz Gerber, Simon Hug, and the editors for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. We also thank participants in the Queen s University Centre for the Study of Democracy Conference on the Growing Use of Referendums for their comments. Chapter 7 The Medium is the Message: How Referendums Lead Us to Understand Equality I am grateful to David Laycock, Stéphane Lévesque, Colin Macleod, and the editors for reading and commenting on this paper. I also thank David Hughes for his excellent research assistance. Chapter 8 Voters Decisions in the Nordic EU Referendums of 1994: the Importance of Party Cues Note: The data which we analyze in this paper are available from the Norwegian Social Science Data Services. We thank Kristen Ringdal for assistance with data analysis. Chapter 9 Are Voters to Blame? Voter Competence and Elite Maneuvers in Referendums The authors would like to thank the editors, James Druckman, Elisabeth Gerber, Simon Hug and participants in the international conference on The Growing Use of Referendums in Liberal-Democratic Societies for helpful comments. Professor Lupia acknowledges the support of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Chapter 10 The News Media and Referendums The authors would like to thank Catherine Côté for conducting the content analysis and her suggestions and input throughout the preparation of the text. We would also like to thank Andrew Parkin for his insightful comments. Special thanks to the video archives in the Department of Political Science at l Université de Montréal and Denis Monière for making the television news broadcasts available to us. xiii

14 xiv Acknowledgments Chapter 11 Constitutional Referendums and Democratic Deliberation For comments on earlier drafts the author would like to thank Rachel Barney, Amy Gutmann, Mark Lichbach, Jeffrey Kopstein, David Mapel, Melissa Williams, the editors, and the entire 99/00 Fellows Seminar at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton.

15 Notes on the Contributors Shaun Bowler is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Riverside. His major research interests concern comparative voting behavior. His work examines the interaction between institutional arrangements and voter choice in a variety of settings ranging from the Republic of Ireland to California s direct democracy elections. He is co-editor of Citizens as Legislators: Direct Democracy in the United States (Ohio State University Press, 1998) and co-author of Demanding Choices: Opinion, Voting and Direct Democracy (Michigan University Press, 1998). Ian Budge is Professor of Political Science at the University of Essex. He is author of several books on political parties and British politics. His most recent book is The New Challenge of Direct Democracy (Polity, 1996). Simone Chambers is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Colorado. Professor Chambers is writing a book on the role of popular deliberation and democratic participation in constitutional change. Her primary areas of scholarship include political philosophy, ethics, and constitutional theory. She has published articles in the Journal of Political Philosophy, and Politics and Society. Her book, Reasonable Democracy: Jürgen Habermas and the Politics of Discourse, won the American Political Science Association, 1997, Best First Book in Political Theory Prize. In 2001 she will be at Princeton as a Laurance S. Rockefeller Fellow at the University Center for Human Values. Stephen C. Craig is Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida, as well as director of the university s Graduate Program in Political Campaigning and of the Florida Institute for Research on Elections. He is author of The Malevolent Leaders: Popular Discontent in America (1993), editor of Broken Contract? Changing Relationships between Citizens and Their Government in the United States (1996), co-editor of After the Boom: The Politics of Generation X (1997), and has published numerous articles in professional journals. Dr. Craig has worked extensively with both academic and political surveys and continues to do polling and focus-group research for clients in Florida and elsewhere. xv

16 xvi Notes on the Contributors Todd Donovan is Associate Professor of Political Science at Western Washington University. He has published widely on ballot measures, voting behavior, minority representation, and third parties in the United States. He is co-editor of Citizens as Legislators: Direct Democracy in the United States (Ohio State University Press, 1998) and co-author of Demanding Choices: Opinion, Voting and Direct Democracy (Michigan University Press, 1998). Avigail Eisenberg is at the Department of Political Science of the University of Victoria, British Columbia. She is also on the board of directors of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association. She teaches and writes in the areas of Canadian politics and democratic theory and is particularly interested in politics involving gender and cultural differences. She is the author of Reconstructing Political Pluralism (SUNY, 1995) and several articles on Canadian democratic politics and jurisprudence. Brian Galligan is Professor of Political Science at the University of Melbourne and Director of its Public Policy Centre. Before taking up his current position in 1995, he was a Professor of Political Science in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University and Director of its Federalism Research Centre. His recent publications include Citizens Without Rights: Aborigines and Australian Citizenship (Cambridge University Press, 1995), jointly authored with John Chesterman, and Defining Australian Citizenship: Selected Documents (Melbourne University Press, 1999), jointly edited with John Chesterman. He is also currently a joint editor of the Australian Journal of Political Science. Elisabeth R. Gerber is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. Her research is concerned with the policy consequences of electoral laws and other political institutions. She has published widely on the use of referendums in California and other states, and has completed two books on the subject, The Populist Paradox (Princeton University Press, 1999), and Stealing the Initiatives with A. Lupia, M. McCubbins, and D. L. Kiewiet (Prentice-Hall, 2000). She is currently involved in a major study of electoral laws in the American states and their effects on election outcomes and representation. Simon Hug is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Texas, Austin. His research interests include the formation of new political parties, the effect of institutions, and more particularly referendums and federalism, on decision-making and

17 Notes on the Contributors xvii conflict resolution. He has published on party formation, green politics, referendums and research methodology. He is the author of Altering Party Systems (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming) and co-author with Stefano Bartolini and Daniele Caramani of Political Parties and Party Systems. A Bibliographic Guide to the Literature on Parties and Party Systems in Europe Since 1945 (Sage, 1998). Richard Jenkins is currently a Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada postdoctoral fellow in the Political Studies Department at Queen s University. He has published previously on election campaigns and the media. Anders Todal Jenssen is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Norweigan University of Science and Technology, Trondheim. His main fields of research are in political psychology and political behavior. He has published several books, most recently To Join or Not to Join, the major study of the EU referendums in the Nordic countries in 1994 (co-edited with Pertti Pesonen and Mikael Gilljam). Richard Johnston is Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia and co-author of Letting the People Decide: Dynamics of a Canadian Election and The Challenge of Direct Democracy: the 1992 Canadian Referendum. He was Principal Investigator of the 1988 and Canadian Election Studies, a consultant on the 1996 New Zealand Election Study, a member of the planning committee for the 1998 U.S. NES Pilot Study, and is co-principal Investigator (with Kathleen Hall Jamieson) of the Annenberg School-University of Pennsylvania Year 2000 Study. His interests range from electoral history to media and informational dynamics in election and referendum campaigns. James G. Kane is editor of Florida Voter, a monthly political journal based on periodic statewide polls of registered voters. Kane also is an adjunct professor with the Graduate Program in Political Campaigning at the University of Florida, teaching courses in campaign management, lobbying, and survey research. Working with other faculty members at UF, he has co-authored several articles, book chapters, and conference papers dealing with various aspects of public opinion and voting behavior in the United States. Amie Kreppel is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida. She is a specialist in comparative politics with an emphasis

18 xviii Notes on the Contributors on the institutions of the European Union, Italy, political parties, party systems and the legislature of Western Europe and the American Congress. Ola Listhaug is Professor of Political Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim. His main fields of research are in political behavior and comparative politics. He has published a large number of articles in various journals. Arthur Lupia is a Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. He has a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology. He studies the initiative process, the dynamics of voter decision making, and elections generally. His book, The Democratic Dilemma: Can Citizens Learn What They Need to Know? (co-authored with Mathew D. McCubbins and published by Cambridge University Press, 2000), combines insights from the disciplines of political science, economics, and cognitive science to explain how citizens gather and use information when making political decisions. In 1998, he was the first social scientist to receive the National Academy of Sciences Award for Initiatives in Research. Matthew Mendelsohn is Associate Professor in the Political Studies Department at Queen s University. He has published on the media, public opinion, and public participation in decision-making in such journals as the British Journal of Political Science, the Canadian Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, and Electoral Studies. He is currently writing about public opinion on constitutional issues in Quebec and the rest of Canada. He spent as Senior Advisor at the Privy Council Office, Government of Canada. Laurence Morel has published widely on referendum voting and why governments choose to use the referendum device in Europe. She teaches at Institute d Études Politiques de Lille, France. Andrew Parkin is Assistant Director of the Centre for Research and Information on Canada. He previously held the position of Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Democracy at Queen s University. His teaching and publications have addressed issues in the fields of democratic theory, political participation, social movements, and Canadian politics.