The Trouble With Referendums

Tuesday, 13th April 2010

I'm not opposed to local referenda and ballot initiatives. But they need to be carefully handled. As commenters have pointed out and as California's experience demonstrates these can easily fall prey to powerful interest groups. This is especially so if the threshold for putting an issue on the ballot is too low. And 5% of available voters is, I'd hazard, too low. Apart from anything else experience suggests that youcan get 10% of voters to believe in just about anything.

Consider this example from tonight's YouGov tracking poll: 11% of voters say they'd like to see a "Grand Coalition" in which the Tories, Labour and the Liberals share power. That's madness, obviously and a reminder that when turnout is too high or too low it can be heavily influenced by people who really ought not to be allowed anywhere near a polling place. The other problem, mind you, is that most of us are, on some given issue, one of those people...

The other interesting finding? Just 19% of respondents say that a Labour government is their preferred outcome. Since 30% say they'd like the Tories to rule on their own this may perhaps suggest that Labour are suffering from an Enthusiasm Gap...

Filed under: Election 2010 (599 more articles) , Tories (273 more articles)

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ndm

April 14th, 2010 10:23pm Report this comment

A big problem with referendums is how they destroy political accountability. Once an issue is decided by referendum it is almost impossible to change through the political process without revisiting the voters. This gives politicians one more excuse to ignore an issue regardless of how pressing it becomes.

But the really big problem is that electors are less informed on issues and their consequences than are politicians whose job it is to understand these issues. Admittedly, different political parties may have a different understanding of the effects of a particular policy but this is not the same as ignorance - which, in my experience, seems to be the traditional public understanding.

Even a seemingly simple issue such as whether or not Britain should switch to the Euro becomes fairly complex once you move on from public attachment to the Queen's head on a banknote. There is a reason for putting politicians between the public and policy.

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