The Referendum Boomerang
In October 2016, Italian citizens will vote on a national referendum whether to ratify the draft constitutional reform approved by Parliament at the behest of the Renzi government. The recent surprising win of the Leave camp in the UK referendum over Brexit makes the outcome of the Italian referendum even more uncertain.
These are the two most recent examples on how referenda lend themselves to biased and polarized debate that fails to fully inform citizens on the crucial issues that are put to vote.
For the sake of clarity let's starty by saying there are two different types of referendum. There are are abrogative referenda, i.e. those which repeal laws passed by parliament. And there are referenda to pass new laws, which are concerned with draft legislation not yet in force. There are those which have a consulting role, which aims to orient the activities of political decision makers. Then there are constitutional referenda, which confirm whether or not a reform of the Constitution should take place. And the list could go on.
Technical features aside, referenda lend themselves to manipulation by unscrupulous politicians, who try to diminish their importance or, to the contrary, to attribute more importance to them than they really have. And this is understandable, considering that it is the main tool of direct democracy. With a referendum, political will goes back to the people, which directly exercises the sovereignty usually delegated to elected representatives.
If therefore on the one hand the referendum is an opportunity to engage citizens in public debate over the most important choices, on the other hand it is a rather blunt tool for the complexity of certain political assessments that need to be made. The voter, in fact, can only vote yes or no, without making any distinctions and without any room for nuance.
In this sense it is to be welcome an aspect in the Renzi-Boschi reform that aims to raise the number of signatures needed to call for a referendum. It is good, in fact, that the word goes back to the people only in the case of fundamental choices. On the contrary, Italian constitutional history has given us many cases of referendums on marginal and highly technical issues, like the recent one on offshore drilling rights. All systematically rejected by voters, who have chosen not to participate in consultations of peripheral interest, therefore failing to reach the 50% electoral participation quorum necessary for the validity of a non-constitutional referendum in Italy.
It needs also to be said that a referendum, behind the apparent will to return the power of decision to the people, can in fact hide a political objective of those in government. Just think of the referendum pm whether Great Britain should leave or remain in the EU, which on June 23 was decided by British citizens in favor of severing political ties with the European Union. It was the by-product of a reckless promise made by David Cameron to win the elections. Now that he is on his way out of Downing Street, and the UK no longer part of a weakened European bloc, it can be easily seen that referenda should be used with caution, because they can have incalculable consequences, not least for those who decided to wield them. The same could be said for the EU referendums held in France and the Netherlands in 2005, whose double-no vote killed the project of a European Constitution at birth.
In short, referenda should be used with extreme caution. The nature of liberal democracies is such that those who have been voted to represent the people in parliament and government take responsibility for the political choices they make, even if they sit uncomfortably with parts of the populations. Voters themselves will judge how they fare when the time comes, by either voting for them or sending them packing.