Democratic Innovations and Ballot Measures

Ballot measures - a category that includes devices such as referendums, plebiscites, and citizens' initiatives - have been described as type of democratic innovation. However, little work has been done to survey the variety of institutional innovations within ballot measures, such as mandate referendums, two-stage referendums, the integration of deliberative mini-publics with ballot measures, and the use of constituency referendums. Mandate referendums ask citizens to first vote on a principle, such as independence from a country or exit from a supranational organization, in order to endorse negotiations with a second referendum to be held on the negotiated agreement. Two-stage referendums, as used in New Zealand, ask citizens to vote in one referendum to choose between multiple alternatives to the status quo and to vote in a separate referendum on whether to maintain the status quo or not. Mini-publics - small groups of citizens who participate in facilitated deliberations - have played key agenda setting roles prior to some ballot measures, such as in British Columbia, and contributed to public discourse in others. Lastly, constituency referendums are a relatively rare phenomenon in which elected officials temporarily act as delegates by offering citizens in their district the opportunity to cast a ballot to determine the representatives' vote on an upcoming piece of legislation. In this paper, I review these four innovative processes and examine several speculative possibilities for further innovation in referendum practices, such as the possible use of what I call 'review referendums' and 'citizen counterproposals'. Review referendums are government-initiated referendums that are scheduled to occur in the future, after a piece of legislation has been implemented for a designated period of time. The enabling legislation in these cases contains a measure that would trigger a referendum on repealing the law in question. Citizen counterproposals are a process by which citizens can launch a petition in response to a government-initiated referendum. If the petition is approved, two competing questions would appear on the ballot, one written by the government and one written by citizens. I contend that many of these innovations are the result of elite attempts at manipulating procedures to bring about a particular outcome. However, these motives do not eliminate the potential for these innovations to provide solutions to some of the problems commonly associated with the use of ballot measures. These two features suggest that the democratic quality of ballot measures is likely to be shaped by structural inequalities in democratic systems that allow some actors to stack the deck in their own favour. One way of mitigating inequalities of power in ballot measures, although imperfect, is to regulate them at least as heavily as elections are regulated.