Abstract

Scholarship has categorized referendums predominantly along their procedural and institutional features. This paper moves beyond these formal dimensions, argues that the policy subjected to a popular vote is the missing link and proposes a complementary typology based on the policy areas. This typology fosters comparisons across countries, political systems and over time within one policy area, thus serving as a powerful analytical tool for further analyses. At the same time, the typology maps out the history of referendum use showing the chronology of salient issues in different societies. The empirical evidence draws on an original dataset of 630 nationwide referendums in Europe between 1793 and 2019.

Highlights

  • Over the last two decades, the literature on referendums flourished to reflect the increasing use of direct democracy around the world

  • The typology of direct democratic votes becomes somewhat simpler by including only four types of votes: mandatory referendums, popular votes called by authorities, popular votes called by citizens and citizens’ initiatives (Svensson 2011)

  • Previous typologies are built along institutional features and ignore, to a great extent, the core of popular votes, i.e. the policy

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Summary

Introduction

Over the last two decades, the literature on referendums flourished to reflect the increasing use of direct democracy around the world. The typology of direct democratic votes becomes somewhat simpler by including only four types of votes: mandatory referendums, popular votes called by authorities, popular votes called by citizens (on a newly passed or existing law) and citizens’ initiatives (Svensson 2011). Several authors developed their own (usually rather short) categorization based on the type of referendums analysed in their research. Neither do we incorporate unofficial/private referendums—e.g. Italy in 2007 as trade unions and the government organized a referendum where only employees, unemployed and pensioners were called to vote (approximately 15 million out of the total electorate of approximately 50 million)

The dataset includes the following countries and territories
Findings
Conclusions

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