Tierney, S. (2014) “Europe is entering the ‘age of the referendum’, but there is nothing to fear for European democracy if referendums are properly regulated“, LSE EUROPP, 02 September.
Referendums have become increasingly common occurrences in European states in recent decades. Stephen Tierneywrites on some of the potential benefits and dangers of using referendums to solve key constitutional questions. He writes that while referendums can undermine democracy if used incorrectly, they generally suffer from problems of practice rather than principle and these problems can be overcome in healthy democracies by suitable referendum design.
Referendums are now being used in constitutional decision-making to an unprecedented extent. It has been estimated that of the 58 functioning electoral democracies with a population of more than three million, 39 had conducted at least one national referendum between 1975 and 2000. Nowhere is the referendum more in vogue than in Europe. Direct democracy proliferated particularly with the collapse of the USSR and Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, where referendums were used first to legitimise secession (rapidly spun by the international legal establishment as state collapse), and in due course to construct new states and new constitutions. The reverberations are still being felt, for example in the Montenegrin referendum of 2006.
Relevant posts:
- McCormick, J. (2014) “The Meaning of a British Exit from the European Union“, LSE EUROPP, 29 July.
- Hudson, M. (2014) “EU Voters Turn Against Austerity“, Michael Hudson Blog, 29 May.
- Alonso, S. (2013) “The Eurozone is not suffering from an economic crisis, but a crisis of national politics“, LSE European Politics and Policy Blog, 20 November.