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Referendums: A Comparative Study of Practice and Theory, edited by David Butler and Austin Ranney, deals with the increasing use of popular referendums in several nations around the world to express widespread and growing dissatisfaction with the responsiveness and sagacity of elected representatives. The “taxpayers’ revolt” in America is being waged largely through referendums, such as California’s Proposition 13. Referendums will soon be held to determine whether a number of regions–for example, Quebec, Scotland, Wales, and Puerto Rico–will achieve more home rule or complete independence. Even many authoritarian regimes are turning to referendums to add a gloss of democratic legitimacy to their actions.
The editors have assembled current studies of referendums in Australia, California, France, Ireland, Scandinavia, Switzerland, the United Kingtom, and the United States. On the basis of these studies they offer general conclusions about why referendums are held, whether they produce mostly conservative or liberal policies, and how they affect the institutions and health of representative democracy.
David Butler is a fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford, an adjunct scholar of the American Enterprise Institute, and general editor of the Nuffield Elections Studies. Austin Ranney, a resident scholar of the American Enterprise Institute, is a former president of the American Political Science Association. |
