Constitutional Referendum Research Articles

The Effects of the Election Mediums on Voting Decisions of the School of Communication Students: The Example of the Constitutional Referendum Held on 16th April, 2017

Siyasal kararlara katılım demokratik yapının gerekliliği olarak modern toplumların gündeminde önem arz eden bir olgudur. Siyasal katılımın ilk akla gelen şekli olan oy verme davranışı, toplum içerisinde bireyin sosyoekonomik ve sosyal psikolojik süreçlerinden etkilenmektedir. Bu süreci etkileyen bir başka önemli öğe de kitle iletişim araçlarıdır. Zira temsili demokrasilerin hakim olduğu günümüz modern toplumlarında, bilgisayar ve internet teknolojilerinde kaydedilen ilerlemeler, bilginin zaman ve uzam içerisindeki dolaşımını artırarak şekillendirmekte ve bu durum bireyin kamusal olaylara bakışı üzerinde de etkili olabilmektedir. Siyaset ile iletişimin birleşiminden doğan ve bu iki alanın birbirinden ayrılmasını gittikçe güçleştiren siyasal iletişimin, kitle iletişim araçlarına bağımlı bir görünüm arz ettiği söylenebilir. Bu çalışma, aldıkları eğitimle gelecekte bu alana yön vermeleri beklenen iletişim fakültesi öğrencilerinin siyasal gündem takibi ve oy verme davranışlarını ortaya koymayı amaçlamaktadır. 16 Nisan 2017 Anayasa Değişikliği Referandumu örneğinde iletişim fakültesi öğrencilerinin medya kullanım alışkanlıkları ile oy verme davranışı arasındaki ilişki üzerine gerçekleştirilen bu çalışmada iletişim mecralarının öğrencilerin siyasal kararlara katılımına etkisinin sınırlı kaldığı sonucuna ulaşılmıştır.

Parlamenter Sistemde Başkanlık Dış Politikasını Şekillendirmek: Erdoğan ve Muhtarlar Toplantıları

During the period between his election as the Turkish president in August 2014 and the constitutional referendum that introduced a presidential system in Turkey in April 2017, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan tried to demonstrate that he would not be a symbolic political figure in Turkish politics as many former Turkish presidents had been. Instead, he would keep shaping the domestic and foreign agenda of the country, as it would happen in a presidential system. One of the main ways he did this was through a series of mukhtars’ meetings, which began in January 2015. From that point, until the desired changes to the constitution were approved through public referendum, Erdoğan held thirty-seven mukhtars’ meetings. In these meetings he gave speeches about Turkish domestic and foreign policy directly to a group of mukhtars but, more importantly, indirectly to the Turkish public and foreign actors. This article will analyze Erdoğan’s foreign policy messages through his discourse in the mukhtars’ meetings and try to answer two controversial questions regarding his foreign policy ideology: Whether he is an Islamist and whether he is shifting the foreign policy axis of Turkey.

The Democratic Party between change and settlement. Chronicle of a particular year

ABSTRACTThe year 2017 represents a key moment in the political life of the PD. The party celebrated 10 years of existence and did so by electing a new leader via open primaries, following the same symbolic process of its founding moment in 2007. However, the party has radically changed in the last decade and in the last year in particular. Not only has a dynamic of personalization started (and continued) to characterize the functioning of the party’s central organs (thanks to the centralized leadership imposed by Renzi, especially during his tenure as PM), but in 2017 the party has also experienced the most relevant organizational split since its creation. Party unity has wavered, in particular, since the results of the constitutional referendum in December 2016, and in the first half of 2017 the PD underwent a significant process of organizational change. While the PD grassroots continue to shrink, both in terms of participation in internal elections and of membership figures, its intermediate bodies are increasingly weakened and struggle to mobilize activists and voters at local level. If the PD remains one of the largest parties in Italy, organizationally speaking, its nature and functioning have changed.

THE ROLE OF CHURCH IN STATE AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS DURING THE KIBAKI ERA, 2002-2013

Purpose: The primary objective of this study was to determine the role of church in state and public affairs during the Kibaki Era, 2002-2013Methodology: The methodology employed in this study was qualitative in nature. The study relied mainly on the analysis of an existing dataset from secondary sources. The data was gathered from technical reports, scholarly journals, reference books, past sermons, church publications, official and unofficial doctrine, theologies and from the Kenya National Archives in Nairobi. Other sources of data collection for the study included official statistics collected by government and the various agencies, bureaus and departments. The target population for this study was the mainland churches in Kenya and the role these churches played in state and public affairs in Kenya between 2002 and 2007.Results: The Kibaki era has been characterized by many an events that have attracted by far and wide the attention of the clergy. In 2005, the most significant development of the 2005 constitutional referendum is not the defeat of the draft, but the emergence of strains and tensions not just between Christians and Muslims, but also between church and state. Another significant development was the fact that the mainline clergy were increasingly viewed as partisan and divided along ethnic lines and serving narrow political interest depending on the ethnic group to which its leaders belonged. The prophetic role and voice of the church to act as the conscience of society was lost, and the church did nothing to evaluate its own role even after the people voted to soundly reject the draft constitution.Unique contribution to Theory, Practice and Policy: The study recommended that the government should put in place laws that would involve the church in government matters. This can be done by introducing motions into parliament that advocate for the direct involvement of the church. This would involve laws which ensure that a portion of all members sitting in any committee represents the church. This can also be done by the introduction of electoral posts for church representatives just as there are positions for women representatives. The study also recommends that amendments be made to the constitution to make a legal requirement that one of the nominated MPs must be from the church.

Forensic analysis of Turkish elections in 2017-2018.

With a majority of ‘Yes’ votes in the Constitutional Referendum of 2017, Turkey continued its drift towards an autocracy. By the will of the Turkish people, this referendum transferred practically all executive power to president Erdoğan. However, the referendum was confronted with a substantial number of allegations of electoral misconducts and irregularities, ranging from state coercion of ‘No’ supporters to the controversial validity of unstamped ballots. Here we report the results of an election forensic analysis of recent Turkish elections to clarify to what extent it is plausible that these voting irregularities were present and able to influence the outcome of the referendum. We apply statistical forensics tests to identify the specific nature of the alleged electoral malpractices. In particular, we test whether the data contains fingerprints for ballot stuffing (submission of multiple ballots per person during the vote) and voter rigging (coercion and intimidation of voters). Additionally, we perform tests to identify numerical anomalies in the election results. For the 2017 Constitutional Referendum we find systematic and highly significant statistical support for the presence of both ballot stuffing and voter rigging. In 11% of stations we find signs for ballot stuffing with a standard deviation (uncertainty of ballot stuffing probability) of 2.7% (4 sigma event). Removing such ballot-stuffing-characteristic anomalies from the data would tip the overall balance from ‘No’ to a majority of ‘Yes’ votes. The 2017 election was followed by early elections in 2018 to directly vote for a new president who would now be head of state and government. We find statistical irregularities in the 2018 presidential and parliamentary elections similar in size and direction to those in 2017. These findings validate that our results unveil systematic and potentially even fraudulent biases that require further attention in order to combat electoral malpractices.

The meaning change of hayır during the Turkish constitutional referendum 2017

Hayır means both ‘good’ and ‘no’ in present-day Turkish. Hayır ‘good’ has been predominantly associated with a religious undertone. Recently, the Neo-Ottoman movement under the AKP has built on this connotation to promote their political ideology. In the 2017 Turkish constitutional referendum, the Turkish people decided whether they wanted to endorse this ideology: Evet (yes) meant increasing the power of the presidency and the AKP, while hayır (no) meant sustaining the competency of the parliamentary system. This led to an odd situation where a pro-democratic vote and a diametral Neo-Ottoman ideology were expressed with the same word. No-voters soon began to take up this homonymy to contest the regime. By entering Neo-Ottoman ‘good’ into a dialogue with ‘no’, the second meaning of hayır, they managed to alter its meaning to directly oppose Neo-Ottomanism. To make sense of the mechanism behind this and such cases of lexical appropriation, we apply Silverstein’s (1976, 2003) theory of indexicality and indexical orders. We put forward the idea that focussing on the motivations of the relevant parties initiating or contesting the change alone falls short of the complexity of the phenomenon. The meaning change can only be fully understood when accounting for the complex indexical history of the appropriated word.

Democratic legitimacy does not require constitutional referendum. On ‘the constitution’ in theories of constituent power

Constitutional referendum – Popular sovereignty – Constituent power – Democratic legitimacy – Participation in referendum as exercise of constituent power – The legal status conception of the constitution – The legal functions conception of the constitution – Open question whether every provision in codified constitutions is essential to constituent power – Therefore, constitutional referendum not always mandated by democratic legitimacy

Making Referendums Safe for Democracy: A Call for More and Better Deliberation

AbstractIn this essay I argue that when thinking about the design of referendums we should pay particular attention to the quality, substance, and inclusiveness of the debate and deliberation that precedes the vote. This is especially true for constitutional referendums that affect fundamental laws. I suggest that drawing out the procedure over time and including citizens’ mini‐publics might be helpful additions to our design tools box.

The State Con-Con Papers

The State Con-Con Papers is a collection of J.H. Snider’s 47 short essays on the history, democratic function, and politics of the periodic state constitutional convention referendum, which is mandated by 14 U.S. state constitutions. The essays, organized chronologically, cover four of the most recent referendums: Hawaii (2018), New York (2017), Rhode Island (2014), and Maryland (2010). In each of these four states, the convention referendum is the only constitutional mechanism that allows the people — the sovereign — to bypass the state legislature’s gatekeeping power over constitutional amendment. The title, The State Con-Con Papers, draws an analogy with The Federalist Papers, a famous collection of newspaper commentaries that discuss the proposals generated by America’s 1787 constitutional convention.

Polarized Ukraine 2014: opinion and territorial split demonstrated with the bounded confidence XY model, parametrized by Twitter data.

Multiple countries have recently experienced extreme political polarization, which, in some cases, led to escalation of hate crime, violence and political instability. Besides the much discussed presidential elections in the USA and France, Britain's Brexit vote and Turkish constitutional referendum showed signs of extreme polarization. Among the countries affected, Ukraine faced some of the gravest consequences. In an attempt to understand the mechanisms of these phenomena, we here combine social media analysis with agent-based modelling of opinion dynamics, targeting Ukraine's crisis of 2014. We use Twitter data to quantify changes in the opinion divide and parametrize an extended bounded confidence XY model, which provides a spatio-temporal description of the polarization dynamics. We demonstrate that the level of emotional intensity is a major driving force for polarization that can lead to a spontaneous onset of collective behaviour at a certain degree of homophily and conformity. We find that the critical level of emotional intensity corresponds to a polarization transition, marked by a sudden increase in the degree of involvement and in the opinion bimodality.

BURUNDI: Constitutional Referendum

Africa Research Bulletin: Political, Social and Cultural SeriesVolume 55, Issue 5 p. 21857B-21858A Internal Developments BURUNDI: Constitutional Referendum First published: 13 June 2018 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-825X.2018.08260.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume55, Issue5June 2018Pages 21857B-21858A RelatedInformation

Letting “the people(s)” decide: peace referendums and power-sharing settlements

ABSTRACTReferendums have been used to legitimate power-sharing settlements in deeply divided societies transitioning from conflict. This article assesses the capacity of referendum rules to facilitate the “voice” of multiple groups or “peoples” in the decision to share power as a “constitutional moment.” Drawing on the constitutional referendums in Northern Ireland in 1998 and Iraq in 2005, the author demonstrates that referendum rules matter in highlighting the variable degrees of support for the elite-negotiated deal on the part of the contending groups. The institutional design process prior to the referendum is crucial for incentivising groups to support the settlement, particularly the previously dominant group. When faced with a choice between a simple majority threshold and countermajoritarian procedures, majoritarianism is appropriate only in so far as the main groups see their constitutional preferences satisfied and concurrent majorities can be secured. A qualified majority referendum threshold to protect a minority group is appropriate for divided states where the groups are regionally concentrated and when the groups agree to such rules. Important for the legitimation of power-sharing, referendums highlight the likely variable extent of approval on the part of the main groups, necessitating ongoing efforts to foster public support for the deal.

Dialectics of Reform and Repression: Unpacking Turkey's Authoritarian “Turn”

AbstractTwenty-first century Turkey has been shaped by two conflicting trends: all-encompassing reform in almost all aspects of law that were transformative if not altogether progressive, and an increasing erosion of the rule of law, which finally culminated in a nation-wide emergency regime and the April 2017 constitutional referendum. The pressing question for many is why the promising reform era was abandoned for crude repression? In this essay, we answer this question by challenging its very foundation and pointing instead to an alternative line of inquiry concerning Turkish politics and society, one that focuses precisely on the interplay between reform and repression. The constitutional referendum of April 2017 compels observers and scholars of Turkey to reevaluate the interplay between reform and repression. Rather than reading contemporary Turkey as a case of relapse from reform into repression, as many commentators do, we suggest approaching reform and repression as concomitant and complementary modes of government.

Turkey at a Crossroads? The 2017 Referendum's Challenges and Opportunities

AbstractA thorough assessment of Turkey's 2017 constitutional referendum requires a review of (1) the process that led to the formulation of the changes; (2) the amendments’ impact on the judiciary; (3) the risks posed by the emerging regime after the implementation of the changes or, in other words, the political governance structure of Turkey after 2019; and (4) the opportunities and dangers facing Turkey's democracy within the current context. The analysis below indicates that the amendments adopted under a state of emergency might result in an irreversible power grab and risk democratic collapse but also offer an opportunity to reconstruct Turkey's political sphere to better address challenges to its democracy.

April 16, 2017 – Notes of the Captain of the Spaceship sent to Planet of Exile

I started writing this story on the day after the constitutional referendum in Turkey, which took place on 16th of April, 2017. The referendum took place under a State of Emergency which meant that the legal structures which could check the elections were not functioning as they should have been. The referendum was about Turkey’s state system changing into a presidential system or not; and in the case of “yes” to the presidential system, the parliament would only have symbolic power beginning with the establishment of new constitution and current political power would have the legal basis to stay in power forever. The election turned out to be 51% “yes” after the High Electoral Board decided to accept ballots that had not been officially stamped (which “coincidentally” turned out to be approximately two million new “yes” ballots) a few hours before the election was about to result. I was in Toronto on that day, surrounded with my friends from Turkey working towards their PhDs in Toronto like me. My experience as a young person trying to deal in Canada alone had been deeply traumatizing despite my privileges like being able to speak English (with an accent), not being “illegal”, studying at the University of Toronto, and having enough economic sources to live. In Canada I, for the first time in my life, understood what it means to be stripped from my personhood and to negotiate on my own existence. I understood that the best immigrant is the quiet and grateful one, the one who doesn’t dare to see herself as equally human; and I was, and am, far away from that. On the day of the referendum my pride and human dignity were severely broken because of the incommunicable situation I was in (both for Canadians and for my friends and family in Turkey), and this story is about that. I hide it in the allegory to make it speakable.

Recent Political Change in Myanmar and Its Impact on her Economic Growth

The present study estimates the causal effect of a process of political change, namely, a recent constitutional referendum, on economic growth in Myanmar. To analyze the impact of this process, this study compares the trajectories of actual and counterfactual GDP per capita after the referendum using the synthetic control method. We calculate the counterfactual GDP per capita using country‐level panel data from 2002 to 2013, with Myanmar as the treated country and a set of developing countries in East and South Asia, the Pacific and sub‐Saharan Africa as the control group. The results of the synthetic analysis suggest that the recent process of political change in Myanmar had a positive and significant effect on GDP per capita but not on per capita foreign direct investment or trade.

Was Mattarella worth the trouble? Explaining the failure of the 2016 Italian constitutional referendum

The election of President Mattarella is a turning point in Matteo Renzi’s attempt to reform the constitution. This choice determined the loss of Forza Italia’s support to the constitutional reform, thus leaving the Renzi cabinet and the Democratic Party alone on the Yes-side. Our goal is to assess the degree of Renzi’s misjudgment by comparing two theoretical perspectives on voting behavior in direct-democratic settings through a nested design. Our results highlight that vote choices can be explained by both the systematic and the heuristic modes of information processing. Respondents’ agreement with the content of the reform (systematic mode) and a positive evaluation of the Renzi cabinet (heuristic mode) are key predictors of Yes vote. Instead, the negative assessment of the economic situation is a crucial driver of No vote. Lastly, we build a bridge between these two perspectives by showing that partisan attachments conditioned the effect of respondents’ content evaluation on voting behavior.

Learning from the other side: how social networks influence turnout in a referendum campaign

Interpersonal discussion is considered to be one of the most influential sources of opinion formation and behaviour. Yet, an unresolved puzzle remains within the literature: while some studies show that discussion with not like-minded citizens depresses political participation, other studies, on the contrary, indicate that the same type of interpersonal discussion can foster political engagement. In this study, we address this unresolved democratic dilemma for the first time in a context of direct democracy, by focussing on the campaign leading to the 2016 Italian constitutional referendum. Specifically, we pay particular attention to the interaction between network diversity, ambivalence, and political knowledge. The findings show that frequent interactions with not like-minded citizens increase turnout. The results based on regression models and structural equation modelling indicate that this positive effect is channelled mainly through political learning, since network diversity increases factual knowledge about the constitutional reform, which in turn is associated with an increase in turnout. We do not find a significant effect of network diversity on ambivalence, as predicted by previous studies. These findings have important implications for deliberative theories and campaign strategies.

Blaming the Polish plumber: phantom agents, invisible workers, and the liberal arena

The French ‘no’ vote to the European constitutional referendum of 2005 was broadly attributed by political elites and mainstream media to popular fear of the Polish plumber. This phantom of globalised neoliberal labour does not, however, emerge from vernacular culture but from a deep-rooted liberal imaginary that constitutes the autonomous individual through repudiation of both intimate and foreign Others. This paper proposes the concept of phantom agents as a mechanism through which accredited political actors seek to account for the exclusions of the liberal arena and, more concretely, deflect blame for bad outcomes from themselves onto voters. Tracing the circulation and afterlife of the plumber figure through political performances across French and Anglo-American arenas, I argue that the normative chain of agencies sustaining liberal democracies—reciprocal attributions of praise and blame among representatives, media, and voters—is discredited by phantom attributions that constrain the visibility of living working-class actors and impede their access to normative political agency as liberal individuals. Accordingly, excluded actors may instead seize agency within the political arena through the ‘acting out’ of phantom personae.

Ustavna revizija - procedura u kontekstu ustavotvorne vlasti

Each Constitutional framer pays special attention to the procedure of constitutional amendment and reserves special section for it in the Constitution. The forms of constitutional revision have been developed throughout history as of a Constituent assembly, via a constituent referendum to legislative (representative) bodies, which decide on the change of the highest normative act in a special constitutional procedure. The procedure is very important as a look out of securing contextual legitimization for adopting the highest normative act of the national legal system and thus justifying the values of the constituent power. Therefore the implementation of a certain model of constitutional revision must be perceived through the lens of authority's legitimacy and the legitimacy of the procedure. The revision of the Serbian Constitution in the procedure of the mandatory national referendum is worthy of special attention, because the constitutional referendum has been arranged as a people's vote whose result is legally binding regardless of the number of voters - participants in the referendum. This implies certain consequences and opens the questions: who is the holder of the constituent power and how is the will of the constitutional authority being exercised? At the first glance in this formal question lies an equation for understanding the connection between the constituent power and the principle of national sovereignty, in other words the connection between the will of the constituent power and the will of the people.