Bringing the policy in: a new typology of national referendums
- PDF / 749,072 Bytes
- 17 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 14 Downloads / 186 Views
Bringing the policy in: a new typology of national referendums Nanuli Silagadze1 · Sergiu Gherghina2
© The Author(s) 2019
Abstract Scholarship has categorized referendums predominantly along their procedural and institutional features. This paper moves beyond these formal dimensions, argues that the policy subjected to a popular vote is the missing link and proposes a complementary typology based on the policy areas. This typology fosters comparisons across countries, political systems and over time within one policy area, thus serving as a powerful analytical tool for further analyses. At the same time, the typology maps out the history of referendum use showing the chronology of salient issues in different societies. The empirical evidence draws on an original dataset of 630 nationwide referendums in Europe between 1793 and 2019. Keywords Europe · Policy · Referendum · Typology
Introduction Over the last two decades, the literature on referendums flourished to reflect the increasing use of direct democracy around the world. Scholars developed new analytical tools and attempted to look beyond single-case studies. Comparative analyses require, among others, the possibility to assess referendums on the basis of their features, to be able to draw meaningful conclusions about their similarities and differences. To this end, several authors offered typologies to capture the essence of direct democracy in general and of referendums in particular (Uleri 1996; Beramendi et al. 2008; Kaufmann et al. 2010; Altman 2011; Svensson 2011). However, there are two major problems with these typologies. First, they are designed exclusively around
* Nanuli Silagadze [email protected] Sergiu Gherghina [email protected] 1
Social Science Research Institute (SAMFORSK), Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland
2
Department of Politics, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland, UK
Vol.:(0123456789)
N. Silagadze, S. Gherghina
the institutional characteristics of the popular vote (e.g. binding vs. non-binding, mandatory vs. facultative, top-down vs. bottom-up) and limit the scope of analysis. Second, this focus on procedures rather than substance partially decouples the existing typologies from the main directions of research on referendums that focus on substantive issues: the causes for their introduction, functioning and consequences (Altman 2011; Geissel and Newton 2012; Gherghina 2017; Qvortrup 2014b). This article aims to bridge the divide and suggests a typology that has at its core the topics and policy areas subjected to vote in referendums. Over time, the topics subjected to popular vote are repeated throughout the world and some are more common than others. However, in the absence of a typology about topics, researchers cannot identify trends or compare referendums organized on the same topic. To date, there is no comparative analysis of the policies subjected to national-level referendums in Europe throughout history. The only partial exception is the coding of policies subjected to Swiss federal referendums, which
Data Loading...
