Referendums of Morality: crocodiles, hens, and the punctuated (de)politicisation of the private sphere

Much has been written about the highly politicising effect of referendums. Empirical studies have found strong evidence that direct democratic processes on certain issues or in certain contexts have the potential to educate voters on the referendum issue and communicate policy preferences to political elites, thus increasing issue salience, polarisation, and contestation of these issues in the public sphere. Recent high-profile cases such as Brexit or the Scottish and Catalan independence referendums highlight this propensity of some referendums to accentuate salience and public contestation of the issues they are ostensibly supposed to ‘settle’. Less has been written, however, about the politicising effect referendums on moral issues, in which the public is invited to directly legislate on questions of fundamental social, religious, or cultural values. This paper expands the literature on indirect referendum effects, (de)politicisation, and morality politics through a mixed-methods approach. Firstly, using quantitative interrupted time series analysis of nine moral referendums, I find that, contrary to theoretical expectations, referendums on moral issues appear to have a comparatively ‘settling’ effect on issue salience over the short to medium term, when compared to referendums on other issues. The second part of this paper’s analysis presents a qualitative comparison of two case-studies, the 2018 Irish abortion referendum and the 2017 Australian gay marriage referendum. Adopting the lens of critical feminist and queer studies’ critiques of the public-private dichotomy, I explore how the construction and framing of moral issues by political actors during referendum campaigns as belonging to, or emerging (temporarily) from, the so-called ‘private sphere’ may contribute to depoliticising trends that appear somewhat sui generis to morality referendums. The implications of this both for the understanding of indirect referendum effects, and the unique dynamics of direct public legislation on ‘private’ moral issues is discussed.