The Referendum and Political Change

Extract

AS A WAY OF REACHING IMPORTANT POLITICAL DECISIONS, THE referendum is usually regarded as a clumsy and unsatisfactory instrument and quite unimportant as a contribution to political democracy. Yet widespread demands for more participation ‘by the people’ have brought the referendum into new-found favour. Interest has been rekindled too by its application to the issue of membership of the European Community, with the clear possibility of directly comparing the referenda in the four countries involved. This new interest in the referendum comes at a time when many party systems, the traditional supports of a purely parliamentary democracy, appear to be in disarray, and there are signs of increasing volatility within electorates which can foreshadow basic realignments in party systems. Questions now are naturally being raised about the future ordering of democratic politics, and for this reason it seems justifiable to focus an examination of the referendum especially on the problem of political change.