Rule by referendum?

Should the expansion of nuclear power be checked by much stronger safety standards? The citizens of six states—Washington, Colorado, Arizona, Ohio, Montana, and environmentally minded Oregon—voted no.

Should greyhound racing be permitted in California? Voters there said no.

Should casino gambling be permitted to turn Atlantic City into Las Vegas East? Residents of New Jersey answered, you bet!

While most attention in the November 1976 elections was focused on the presidential, congressional, and gubernatorial races, referendums stole headlines in many states, raising again old questions about the relative merits of direct and representative democracy.

Citizens of Massachusetts turned down a proposal to confiscate all hand-guns. Wisconsin voters approved a resolution asking the state to legalize marijuana, while permission to sell liquor by the glass was defeated in Oklahoma. Alaskans voted to move their state capital from Juneau to Willow, near Anchorage. Environmentalists cheered the passage in Maine and Michigan of proposals requiring deposits on all beer and soft drink containers but mourned the defeat of similar proposals in Colorado and Massachusetts. Arkansas residents voted nearly two-to-one against repeal of that state's right-to-work law, and Californians declined to expand the power of farm workers' unions. Michigan voters rejected a proposed limitation on the size of the state budget at the same time that Floridians were defeating a similar proposal to limit the number of state employees.

This brief recounting makes one thing clear: Popular referendums are not confined to a few kinds of issues. Rather, they are used to decide serious questions about civil liberties, government finance, environmental protection, labor organization, and the like. Moreover, the use of referendums—which dates back at least to the American political reform movement—seems to be gaining momentum at the state level and also in municipalities. School tax referendums have long been a feature of local educational finance. A number of cities have used referendums to limit municipal employment to their residents alone and may well turn soon to expenditure limitation proposals. Even wider use is conceivable. In the coming superelectronic age, it is easy to imagine citizens voting in referendums from their homes on national issues.

Reasons for referendums. It is more difficult to explain the reasons behind governance-by-referendum than it is to document the phenomenon. The issues being brought to popular vote differ little from those traditionally left to legislatures, courts, or administrative agencies to decide—with the possible exception of nuclear power, which has profound intergenerational implications.

Nor does the more frequent resort to referendum necessarily reflect disenchantment with the decisions made by elected representatives. In November 1976, as in most other elections, incumbents fared quite well. If voters were displeased with the policies coming out of their state capitols, they did not go right to the heart of the matter by turning the rascals out.

However, the reelection of incumbents could be misleading. Voters might be dissatisfied with the policies enacted by their representatives but be unwilling to turn them out if they blamed the process rather than the incumbents. This, it is argued, can happen because of the power of organized interest groups. It is easy for the producers of a product (or land developers or union members) to coalesce in support of or opposition to legislation. There are relatively few of them, they are in regular contact with each other, and they have a relatively larger stake in selected legislation than does the general electorate. (An import quota on foreign shoes, for example, may benefit each domestic shoe producer by hundreds of thousands of dollars but harm each consumer by no more than a few dollars.) For this reason, organized groups can afford to spend more time and money influencing legislation. Therefore, even a well-meaning representative might be persuaded that the majority would best be served by a policy that actually favors a rather narrow special interest. If one believes that any and all representatives will be vulnerable to this form of pressure, popular referendums may appear to be a better way to express the majority will.

Pros and cons of the referendum. The greater visibility of the referendum leads naturally to questions about its desirability. First the bad news. The referendum process is less flexible than the legislative process. For example, if several issues are simultaneously decided by popular referendum, all voters could possibly end up worse off! This can occur if each voter is in the majority on those issues he cares very little about but in the minority on the issues of great importance to him. Voters might all be willing to accept defeat on one or even several minor issues in exchange for a win on an issue that is important to them. Obviously, such trades cannot be arranged when voters march to the polls to decide for themselves the fate of the issues.

As history attests, such compromises can be arranged by elected representatives who take account of the direction and intensity of their constituents' preferences. This process, sometimes called logrolling, is precisely what Madison and the other framers of the Constitution had in mind when they opted for a geographically representative democracy. Although there is no guarantee that intense minority preferences will be better protected by representative democracy than by direct democracy, such protection is at least possible under the former.

The referendum may also deny the advantages that accompany specialization. That is, elected representatives should know more about each of the issues to be decided than voters do. It is their job. If the system is working right, representatives should be able to make much more informed decisions than citizens who must acquire information in their spare time.

We should also recognize that the outcome of a referendum can be influenced by special interests. Large scale "public education" campaigns—media blitzes, in other words—have in the past dramatically reversed the expected outcomes. The handgun confiscation question in Massachusetts appeared to be an easy winner until the gun lobby went on a spending spree, for example.

Now the good news. First, the referendum gives people an opportunity to make decisions themselves. It enables them to combat a feeling of "powerlessness." Certainly a revival of citizen interest in policy making for whatever reason is to be cheered. Next, voters frequently find little difference between the positions of those vying to represent them or else cannot tell what position a candidate supports. In such cases, the referendum gives them the opportunity to indicate their preferences directly. Referendums also serve to settle questions that legislators may avoid because they are afraid of stirring up this or that group of voters.

If, indeed, issues have become so complex that representatives are unable to make more informed decisions than their constituents, then the referendum may appear to be a simpler way for citizens to control their destinies. Consider as an example the debate in the U.S. Congress surrounding the supersonic transport and the possibility of ozone-depletion of the atmosphere from supersonic flights. In spite of extensive hearings on the subject, the debate came down to which group of scientists our congressmen chose to believe. More and more issues are of this sort. That is, they force a representative to choose between the testimony of one or another "expert witness." In cases like these, voters may feel that they themselves are able to weigh the evidence, such as it may be, and make their choice directly.

Finally, in the extreme case, a switch to direct democracy in a locality would obviate the need for representatives, large staffs, committee meetings, and so forth—leading to substantial savings in administrative and transaction costs.

Concluding note. A clear danger of the referendum approach is that too much good may be expected from the decisions which are returned to the people. Indeed, the problem of intense minority preferences, coupled with the unanticipated effects of policies decided by an uninformed public, might make direct democracy an additional source of frustration to voters already impatient with their political system.

Up to now, as the 1976 experience made clear, the approach to direct democracy has been eclectic. States and localities have resorted to direct democracy on different issues, under different circumstances, for different reasons. Some observers might prefer a tidier approach that identified a set of issues which would be decided more appropriately by referendum vote than by a legislature. These might include some environmental and energy development questions, for example, and questions involving high risk of loss of life. But neither theory nor experience yet provides very definitive guidance. Direct democracy is essentially a fall-back position, the referendum being more a tool of last resort for special situations than an alternative to legislative decision making. To acknowledge this fact is not to deny the usefulness of further efforts to seek a more consistent rationale for deciding whether a question should be decided by direct voting.