Playing New Games with Old Tools: Leaders and Referenda

Abstract

The Strategic Use of Referendums: Power, Legitimacy, and Democracy. By Mark Clarence Walker. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 166 pp., $49.95 (ISBN: 1-4039-6263-4). The Strategic Use of Referendums by Mark Clarence Walker is a brief but informative book that contributes to several literatures, including work on leadership, comparative legislative-executive relations, and the post-Soviet states. In it, Walker places the leader who desires to increase his power (especially vis-a-vis the legislative branch of government) at center stage and builds a theory about how the referendum can be used for that purpose. Walker's theory begins with the premise that, regardless of the type of political system (democratic, authoritarian, or transitional), leaders use similar strategies to call and hold referendums. He defines the referendum as “a submission of a proposed public measure or actual statute to a direct popular vote” (p. 1). About the basic mechanism of referendum politics, he makes three claims (p. 3): 1. Referendums are part of a bargaining process between elites whose bases of power lie in different institutional settings. 2. Referendums give political actors the political legitimacy to pursue change and potentially alter status quo institutions. 3. When introducing referendums, executives can better position themselves along a policy spectrum to win than legislatures can. To explain the third proposition, Walker uses “spatial models” (Morrow 1994) that map the positions of political actors (in this case, executives and legislatures) vis-a-vis the electorate to illustrate that executives are generally closer to the public than is the legislature. To build his theory, Walker explores the cases of Charles De Gaulle and Augusto Pinochet. His primary method is the case study, using a …