Referendum Result Research Articles

Voiceless: a multi-level analysis of the 2023 Voice to Parliament referendum outcome and its implications: an introduction

Voiceless: a multi-level analysis of the 2023 Voice to Parliament referendum outcome and its implications: an introduction

Is ‘Revive’ a ‘game changer’ or more of the same? Whose needs are addressed in Australia’s new cultural policy and what will change?

ABSTRACT This paper addresses the new Australian cultural policy, Revive, released in January 2023 by the Labor Federal Government. The background to the policy development, the policy’s content, and the likely impact of the policy in the longer term, are all explored. This discussion is framed within theoretical understandings of cultural policies, as well as expectations of national cultural policies in other contexts . Consideration is then given to the role partisan politics play in Australia in relation to culture and the arts. In addition, there is an examination of the historical cultural and political framing of Australia in relation to issues around race, culture, and identity, which include referring to the the results of a recent national referendum. Further, the position of the arts sector in a national context is discussed, with particular reference to the funding decline that has afflicted the sector over the past 20 years. Conclusions are then drawn about the place of Revive in contributing to these different conversations.

Norms of Democracy, Staged Democrats, and Supply of Exclusionary Ideology

Existing literature sees attitudinal support for liberal democratic values as a crucial way to prevent the success of illiberal actors and their policies. But recent studies show that democratic support can coexist with lack of punishment for backsliding practices. To reconcile these findings, I argue that social norms generate incentives to declare that one opposes illiberal actors even if one does not—what I call staged democrats. Staged democrats are not a stable safeguard against illiberal politicians, because information shocks can reveal that they do not sincerely oppose illiberalism. Studying Switzerland, where referendums provide information on the sincere preferences of citizens, I collect data on referendum results, public opinion surveys, and party positions. My analyses show that if referendums reveal that the positions of far-right parties are more popular than expected, those parties become more exclusionary. Attitudes only prevent illiberal policy if they are sincerely held.

Политический процесс и формирование государственности в Донецкой Народной Республике

The article analyzes the political process and formation of statehood in the DPR in the context of international law and historical background. It examines the issues of balancing the principle of territorial integrity and the right to self-determination, the evolution of representative bodies in the DPR, and the institutionalization process of the results of the independence referendum. Special attention is paid to historical, cultural, and political factors that have contributed to the region's desire for autonomy. The reasons for the escalation of ethno-political conflict and the role of state-building in protecting the rights of the population of Donbass are explored. The article emphasizes the complexity of assessing the legality of self-proclaimed states and the need to develop a balanced approach in international law to such situations.

Anonymous voting using distributed ledger-assisted secure multi-party computation

High voter turnout in elections and referendums is desirable to ensure a robust democracy. Secure electronic voting is a vision for the future of elections and referendums. Such a system can counteract factors hindering strong voter turnout such as the requirement of physical presence during limited hours at polling stations. However, this vision brings transparency and confidentiality requirements that render the design of such solutions challenging. Specifically, the counting implementation must support reproducibility, and the choice of individual voters must remain confidential. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a novel referendum protocol that ensures transparency, confidentiality, and integrity, in trustless networks. The protocol is built by combining secure multi-party computation and distributed ledger technology, e.g., a Blockchain. The persistence and immutability of the protocol communication allow verifiability of the referendum outcome by any participant. Voters therefore do not need to trust third parties. We provide a formal description and conduct a thorough security evaluation of our proposal.

Референдум о независимости Черногории 2006 года: этноязыковые аспекты

The purpose of the study is to determine the influence of the factor of ethnolanguage identification of the population of Montenegro on the results of the 2006 independence referendum. The article presents arguments pointing to a stable territorial split of Montenegro, confirmed by census materials, the results of referendums in 1992 and 2006, as well as the course of parliamentary and presidential elections. Montenegrins, Serbs and representatives of other ethnic communities have completely different assessments of the geopolitical situation of the republic and have their own vision of the further development of Montenegrin statehood. The scientific novelty of the study consists in an attempt to show a clear correlation of the voting results in each community with the ethnocultural identity of the local population, due to the historical conditions of residence of a particular region within the Montenegrin state. As a result of the study, it was determined that the Orthodox majority of the republic is in a state of deep division into two approximately equal groups – Serbs and Montenegrins. Their separation on the issue of maintaining a unified state entity with Serbia was noticeable even during the collapse of greater Yugoslavia, and finally took shape in the late 1990s and early 2000s in connection with the new course of the political leadership of Montenegro to achieve full independence from Serbia.

Beyond the Ballot: The Impact of Voting Margin and Turnout on the Legitimacy of Referendum Outcomes in Europe

Beyond the Ballot: The Impact of Voting Margin and Turnout on the Legitimacy of Referendum Outcomes in Europe

Disaggregated behavioral responses to willingness‐to‐pay for the electronic levy in Ghana

AbstractThis study investigates the disaggregated behavioral responses of mobile money users' willingness to pay for electronic levy payments in Ghana. We use cross‐sectional survey primary data and a probit regression estimation technique with its associated average marginal effects and check robustness with a linear probability model. The evidence from the study indicates that the disaggregated behavioral factors that drive willingness to pay for the e‐levy include individuals maintaining their current levels of electronic fund transfers, the intention to increase their electronic fund transactions, and intention to stop using electronic fund transfers that attract the e‐levy. Beyond the disaggregated behavioral responses, psychological (e.g., trust in government) and socioeconomic factors (individual income and gender) are identified as important drivers of willingness to pay for the e‐levy. We suggest that policies around e‐levies must not only focus on individual behavioral responses alone, as the drivers include behavioral, psychological, and socioeconomic factors.Related ArticlesAdegboye, Alex, Kofo Adegboye, Uwalomwa Uwuigbe, Stephen Ojeka, and Eyitemi Fasanu. 2023. “Taxation, Democracy, and Inequality in Sub‐Saharan Africa: Relevant Linkages for Sustainable Development Goals.” Politics & Policy 51(4): 696–722. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12547.Lachapelle, Erick, Thomas Bergeron, Richard Nadeau, Jean‐François Daoust, Ruth Dassonneville, and Éric Bélanger. 2021. “Citizens' Willingness to Support New Taxes for COVID‐19 Measures and the Role of Trust.” Politics & Policy 49(3): 534–65. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12404.Shock, David R. 2013. “The Significance of Opposition Entrepreneurs on Local Sales Tax Referendum Outcomes.” Politics & Policy 41(4): 588–614. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12028.

Federal Tax Deductions and the Demand for Local Public Goods

Abstract The United States tax system allows taxpayers to deduct local taxes from their taxable incomes. Using school district referendum results, we employ a continuous treatment two-way fixed-effects framework to provide causal evidence of a positive relation between the demand for local public goods and the share of residents deducting local taxes. We find that a one-percentage-point decrease in the share of residents deducting property taxes reduces tax and bond referendum approval rates by approximately 0.97 percentage points. Because these federal tax deductions disproportionately benefit higher-income individuals, they potentially widen disparities in public service provision across jurisdictions.

Trick or treat? The Brexit effect on immigrants’ mental health in the United Kingdom

This paper investigates changes in the mental health of immigrants living in the United Kingdom (UK) during the European Union (EU) referendum. Using the UK Household Longitudinal Study, this paper assesses how the mental health of immigrants has changed before and after the referendum, compared to natives. Findings suggest that following the EU referendum result, mental health significantly improved overall for naturalised immigrants as a whole and for non-EU immigrants, relative to the changes in natives. Further, there is no evidence that mental health worsened even for EU immigrants. Our results vary by gender, with non-EU women experiencing a statistically significant improvement in mental health. The results are robust to several checks, including using balanced panel data and individual fixed effects. Our findings are consistent with the idea that the end of free movement for EU immigrants has alleviated the perception of discrimination against non-EU immigrants. This interpretation is supported by empirical results from a multinomial logit showing that non-EU migrants, particularly women, are more likely to perceive discrimination for race-related reasons when denied a job, an effect which is no longer significant in the post-referendum period.

TÜRKİYE CUMHURİYETİ’NDE GERÇEKLEŞTİRİLEN İLK REFERANDUM: 1961 REFERANDUMU’NUN ULUSAL BASINA YANSIMASI

The first coup in the Republic of Türkiye was experienced on May 27, 1960. During the Republic period, the concept of referendum again entered the public agenda in this process. It is noteworthy that referendum, one of the most important tools of semi-direct democracy, was also used in the 1961 Constitution and the majority of the people participated in this process. This article aims to examine in detail the reflection of the 1961 Referendum, the first referendum in the history of the Republic of Türkiye, on the national press. It also evaluates the interpretation of the referendum process through cartoons and the effects of these cartoons on social consciousness. The content analysis method was used in the study. By examining materials such as news headlines, columns and cartoons, the media's approaches to the referendum process were tried to be presented from an objective perspective. In this way, the way the referendum was covered in the national press, the political atmosphere of the period and the perception created in the society were revealed through the media.
 This study has revealed the historical context and importance of the 1961 Referendum. It has dealt with the political and social dynamics that led to the referendum, the people's preferences in the referendum, and the effects of the results on Turkish politics. In this context, it has analyzed in detail how the referendum results were received in the national press and how different media outlets gave meaning to these results. Examining the social reflections of the referendum process through cartoons has also constituted an important component of this study.
 As a result, it has been determined that the reflections of the 1961 Referendum in the national press are an important source for understanding the political and social dynamics of the period. The press, one of the most important structural stones of the social and political equation, was used as the main source of the study. In this study, the 1961 referendum was examined as a whole by examining national newspapers. Thus, Türkiye's democratic processes, media relations and the impact of visual media were analyzed.

The unexpected results of the peace referendum changed conflict termination preferences in Colombia

In October 2016, the Colombian electorate narrowly rejected in a plebiscite the final agreement to end the conflict with the longest-running armed insurgency in the Western Hemisphere, the FARC. The plebiscite’s result provides a unique opportunity to assess dynamics in civil conflict termination preferences. I exploit the unexpected victory of the No vote, observed during the AmericasBarometer fieldwork, to estimate the effect of the uncertainty about the trajectory of the conflict generated by the outcome of the plebiscite. The unexpected defeat of the peace plebiscite did not measurably change the expressed support for the recently rejected agreement. However, it increased the public support for a negotiated rather than military settlement to the conflict, as well as respondents’ willingness to give concessions to FARC members. These findings inform the broader literature on civilian preferences toward civil conflict termination and compromise.

The Macroeconomic Challenges Facing the Sunak Government: From Debacle to Tentative Stability

This article starts by looking at the macroeconomic economic challenges faced by the Sunak government when it came into office in October 2022. It succinctly discusses the public spending legacies of the Covid pandemic, before examining the ambitious, yet reckless Growth Plan which Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng presented to the House of Commons on 23 September 2022. The extravagance of the Plan led to sharp sell-offs of UK government bonds and the pound, while almost provoking a financial crisis. This was averted by Bank of England intervention and major policy U-turns, which Liz Truss initiated in the last days of her short premiership. They were then substantially consolidated by the Sunak government at the end of 2022 and throughout 2023. While sense and calm have been restored to government policy – after years of hype and boosterism following the Brexit referendum result – the article goes on to examine the broader context of the Sunak government’s economic policies. It notes that the era of ultra-low interest rates is over, and that the surge in inflation which began in mid-2021, while largely overcome, is far from being over. This will have significant consequences for the cost of borrowing – by government (but also by the private sector) – as pressures on key areas of spending (related to demographic ageing and defence) rise.

How macroeconomic conditions affect systemic risk in the short and long-run?

This study quantifies the effects of macroeconomic variables on various market-based systemic-risk measures in 24 European banks over the 2008–2019 period. In a first step, I measure daily systemic risk for banks based on ΔCoVaR, MES, and SRISK frameworks, and examine the contributions of individual banks to aggregate systemic risk during specific stress events. Systemic risk in European banks has risen in the wake of the global financial crisis and the Brexit referendum result. In a second step, I investigate how macroeconomic conditions affect systemic risk in the short and long-run. I find that three systemic risk measures have a long-run stable relationship with EU industrial production, EU inflation, Euribor, and US equity market volatility, but some variables have opposite effects in the short and long-run.

Прекращение СССР: политико-правовой аспект

The article outlines the legal reasons for the termination of the USSR as a single state, which were numer-ous violations of the Constitution of the USSR, Laws of the USSR, and changes in legislation. The reasons that led to the end of the USSR were objective and subjective factors: civilizational and value-based – the rejection of the state-legal values of socialism, the inaction of the President of the USSR in the matter of protecting the Constitution and laws of the USSR, state sovereignty and territorial integrity of the USSR. A political and legal analysis is given of the results of the USSR referendum of March 17, 1991, the creation and activities of the State Committee for a State of Emergency (GKChP), and the Belovezhskaya Agreement. Attention is paid to the facts of inaction of the President of the USSR M.S. Gorbachev. It is concluded that the authors of the Belovezhskaya Agreement opposed the will of the people expressed in the referendum, and the Belovezhskaya Agreement itself contradicted the laws of the USSR. Based on the given norms of the 1977 USSR Constitution, memoir sources and publications of modern researchers, a legal assessment is made of the cessation of the existence of the USSR as a single state. The history of the end of the USSR allows us to rethink the question of the place of state ideology in the system of state legal values.

Only losers use excuses? Exploring the association between the winner-loser gap and referendum attitudes following a local referendum

ABSTRACT Consultative referendums are becoming more widely used as a way of responding to rising public discontent with the workings of representative democracy. Consequently, consultative referendums have become an integral part of democratic decision-making processes across the world. However, how the population reacts to the referendum outcome is expected to differ among the population as referendums, by design, divides the participants into winners and losers. In turn, creating a winner-loser gap with potentially polarizing societal consequences. This study therefore seeks to explore how this winner-loser gap is associated with several types of referendum attitudes following the outcome of a local referendum. Using survey data (N = 3113) gathered after a high stakes local referendum in Finland, the more explicit research purpose is therefore to analyze how individual-level opinions about referendums, turnout thresholds and margin of victory thresholds are related to the winner-loser gap. Additionally, we also control for whether these associations are moderated by external efficacy and political trust. The results clearly imply that the winner-loser gap have consequences for several types of referendum attitudes, contributing to scholarship about the effects derived from the winner-loser gap.

If you really love nothing. Evaluating second-order factors in the case of Italian constitutional referendum of 2020

The paper evaluates several second-order factors to explain the outcomes of the 2020 constitutional referendum held in Italy. This particular referendum serves as a relevant case study to assess the significance of second-order factors, given its unique characteristics, including the simplicity of the referendum question regarding the reduction in the number of parliamentarians (MPs), the minimal impact on public finances resulting from this reduction, and the subsequent decrease in territorial democratic representation. While it might have been expected that a significant majority would vote in favour of the “No” option, thus preserving the current levels of territorial coverage (and democratic representation) of MPs, the actual results saw a substantial majority in favour of the “Yes” vote (69%). Our argument posits that the overwhelming prevalence of the “Yes” vote (to reduce the number of MPs), especially in poorer areas of the country, can be attributed to specific factors that influence individual evaluations in a direct-democratic setting. In greater detail, by using cross-sectional data, the paper tests the role of socio-economic condition, trust in institutions and political participation in affecting the referendum outcome. The results of our empirical analysis confirm our hypotheses, demonstrating that second-order factors indeed influenced the referendum's outcome. Specifically, our analysis reveals that: (i) a higher socio-economic condition could generate a higher share of “No” votes; (ii) a higher trust in institutions could lead to an increase in the share of “No” votes; finally, that (iii) an increase in political participation could produce a decrease in the share of “No” votes. In the concluding section of the paper, we discuss how this analysis contributes new insights to the study of voting behaviour in direct-democratic contexts.

The front page as a canvas for multimodal argumentation: Brexit in the Greek press

In this paper, we analyze the front pages of mainstream Greek newspapers with the highest circulation reporting the official result of the Brexit referendum in 2016. Our analysis seeks to extract the standpoints and arguments that circulated in the Greek mainstream press on that day by studying the headlines and visuals on the front page. We study the front page not merely as an informative genre but crucially as an argumentative one, where the arguments can be reconstructed with the help of tools from argumentation theory combined with principles from multimodal critical discourse analysis. The proposed approach makes it possible to compare how the different ideological orientations in the Greek public sphere were steered by the representation of this piece of news. We show that, despite their ideological background, the newspapers under study converge to the construction of Brexit as a menacing phenomenon that puts the EU integration to the test and, as such, as an event that should have been avoided.

Behavioural entropy as an individual difference

Introduction & BackgroundThe availability of digital footprints data have provided new and invaluable opportunities for personality psychologists. One way to study individual differences with digital footprints data is through the lens of entropy, which is a measure of the degree of randomness of a probabilistic system. When applied to individual behaviour, entropy captures how predictable an individual’s (e.g., shopping) pattern of behaviour is over time. In this study, we proposed that entropy can be conceptualised as a proxy measure of Openness, a Big Five personality trait. We further studied entropy’s associations with external behavioural outcome, namely the voting outcomes of the 2016 EU ‘Brexit’ referendum in the UK. This referendum asked UK citizens whether the UK should stay in the EU (vote Remain) or leave the EU (vote Leave). It has been demonstrated that Leave (or ‘Brexit’) vote was heavily influenced by attitudes towards immigration which is associated with values of being less ‘open’ to other cultures, and therefore we expected that entropy – or tendency to try new things – would be associated positively with voting Remain. Objectives & ApproachWith a massive data set (20,550,952 customers) provided by a large UK retail chain over a period of 2 years, we computed aggregated entropy for the Local Authority Districts (LADs). Further we investigated the relationships between entropy and personality traits, as well as between entropy and the referendum outcomes, at geographically aggregated levels. Relevance to Digital FootprintsThis study brought together digital footprints data with external sources. This study also identified population level insights by examining personality traits and their utility in predicting sociopolitical outcomes. ResultsResults of a linear regression model showed strong evidence supporting a positive relationship between entropy and Openness (b = 0.30, t = 3.30, p = .001), and a negative relationship between entropy and Neuroticism (b = -0.48, t = -3.53, p < .001). Further, entropy was associated with outcomes of the EU referendum in each LAD. Results of another linear regression model showed strong evidence supporting a positive relationship between the percentage of Remain votes and entropy (b = 0.28, t = 4.80, p < .001). Conclusions & ImplicationsThe relationship between Big Five trait Openness and entropy provided support that personality can be inferred from digital footprints data such as shopping history records. The positive relationship between entropy and the proportion of Remain vote demonstrated that people who are more open to new experiences voted Remain. Our findings have broader implications showing that it is possible to find associations between personality traits extrapolated from shopping data and real-world choices.

The Brexit Vote, Productivity Growth, and Macroeconomic Adjustments in the U.K.

Abstract The U.K. economy experienced significant macroeconomic adjustments following the 2016 referendum on its withdrawal from the European Union. To understand these adjustments, this paper presents empirical facts using novel U.K. macroeconomic data and estimates a small open economy model with tradable and non-tradable sectors. We demonstrate that the referendum outcome can be interpreted as news about a future decline in productivity growth in the tradable sector. An immediate fall in the relative price of non-tradable goods induces a temporary “sweet spot” for tradable producers. Economic activity in the tradable sector expands in the short run, while the non-tradable sector contracts. Aggregate output, consumption, and investment growth decelerate.