The road to the referendum

In April 2009, the House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution published a report entitled Referendums in the United Kingdom. A key issue for the committee – a group of genuine distinction – was the question of when it is appropriate for referendums to be held. This is a question of relevance to many political systems, and one worthy of serious consideration.

Referendums have traditionally been regarded as foreign to the 'Westminster model' of parliamentary democracy. This model is one based on indirect democracy. It is characterized by the election of representatives who campaign on the basis of party manifestos. Once returned to parliament it is the task of members of the majority party to form a government to implement the platform on which it was elected. While the role played by the electors is fundamental to the democratic legitimacy of the system, it is nonetheless limited. Beyond their infrequent visits to the polling booth, the people delegate the task of government to others. They are not invited to pick and choose between different elements of any party's platform. Rather, the governing party is regarded as enjoying a mandate to implement its programme as a whole.

It is obvious that referendums sit uneasily within such a model. Referendums confer on the electorate direct power of decision on a specific issue: one that is deliberately, some might say artificially, isolated from other concerns. When implemented within a Westminster-style parliamentary democracy, referendums also operate outside the broader context and culture of civic engagement and direct democracy that characterizes a system such as Switzerland, where referendums are a regular occurrence. It is little wonder, then, that in the UK and its fellow Westminster-type democracies, referendums have traditionally been viewed with suspicion, and they have remained rarely used. The 1975 vote on continuing membership of the 'Common Market' (as it was then dubbed) was the first ever UK-wide referendum. Only one further such referendum has since occurred: that on the adoption of the Alternative Vote (AV) electoral system for UK general elections, some thirty-six years later. Moreover, the latter came about through highly exceptional circumstances: the formation of the first UK peacetime coalition government since the days of Ramsay MacDonald, and concerning a policy that had not featured in the manifestos of either coalition partner in the preceding general election. Thus, one might reasonably regard the AV ballot as an exception proving the general rule: that referendums do not fit comfortably within, and are not normally a prominent part of, a Westminster democracy.

Wales has greater experience of referendums than the rest of the UK. Local referendums on Sunday drinking were an intermittent feature of Welsh life from the time of the 1961 Licensing Act (which repealed the uniform provisions of the 1881 Sunday Closing (Wales) A