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What could be more democratic than putting an issue to the popular vote? For supporters, referenda are the best way for the public to unambiguously express its will and for politicians to obtain a political mandate (or not). For critics, referenda are ill-suited to deciding complex issues and are associated with majoritarian oppression, vested interests, manipulative information campaigns and polarisation.
With New Zealanders likely to be voting on extending the parliamentary term at the 2026 general election, Dr Russell unpacked the assumptions underlying these positions.
His presentation highlighted four reasons to be skeptical about referenda:
- Referenda give voters the illusion of popular control: a number of crucial decisions such are the wording of the question and the timing of the vote are held by the Government or other political actors.
- The decision rendered by a referendum gives an iIllusion that majorities are in favour. Votes are likely to be spread across multiple options if more than 2 are offered.
- Referenda require the public to make an important political decisions under circumstances that are not conducive to our putting in the effort and the time to make good choices.
- If an issue particularly affects a minority, referenda enable the majority to dominate.
He also spoke to why democrats might feel bad about being skeptical about referenda given that many people are concerned about how our electoral representative system is performing and feel that citizens might be able to do a better job.
we have these worries about parliamentary democracy … but do we, as voting citizens in referenda, perform better … ? Is our decision making likely to have as good or better epistemic quality? Is our decision making likely to respond appropriately to the interests of affected parties? Do we have any kind of accountability and transparency in the decisions that we collectively make through referenda? And I think the answer to all those three things actually is, no!
According to Dr Russell, that is not a reason to leave everything to Parliament. Rather we should be looking to actually improve the quality of our democratic systems and ensure that they are trustworthy. To this end, before answering questions from the floor, he concluded with three options for improving democratic decision making by:
- Making more use of citizens assemblies
- Improving referenda by, for example, adapting Oregon’s Citizens Initiative Review
- Designing more complex decision processes that include multiple participatory mechanisms that, as a whole, make for robust decision making.
Trust Democracy would like to sincerely thank Matheson Russell for sharing his thoroughly engaging presentation and clear explanations with our members and guests.
Further information about the AGM is available at:
Video
Transcript
Table of Contents
Introduction
It’s really great to be with you. It’s nice to see some familiar faces. Thanks to Simon and Andrew for the invitation to speak. And really these are just some opinionated thoughts from me on referenda and their utility, and without giving too much away, I’m going to focus on the criticisms of referenda, particularly in this, in these short comments.
So funnily enough, one of my first political memories is voting in a referendum. So back in 1999, in Sydney, where I was living. Australia was having a referendum on becoming a republic. I don’t know how much attention that received over the ditch. New Zealand’s never had a referendum on becoming a republic, but in Australia there was quite a bit of momentum, and public polling suggested that the referendum would be supported, that most people actually wanted to become a republic. And, as I said, one of my first memories was actually strolling down to the polling booth with my friend Josh, and I can proudly say that I convinced him, on the way to the polling booth, to vote in favour of the Republic.
What I can’t claim is that that had any impact on the result, the referendum was defeated in every State. In the Australian constitution, you need to have a majority of States, and a majority of voters overall, supporting a referendum before a constitution can be changed. So it was soundly defeated, and we haven’t seen a repeat of that effort.
But it is a fond memory that I have, and so it pains me slightly to be critical today about referenda. But I think, as I’ve sort of reflected upon these issues over the last few years, I think my conviction has only increased that there are some real problems with using referenda within democratic decision making. And that stands in tension, I think, with the standard view that we have of democracy.
And so I want to say a little bit about, firstly, why I’m skeptical about the use of referenda, and then, secondly, just to sort of speak a little bit as a political theorist, or democratic theorist, to our intuitions about what democracy is and what makes for democratic decision making and democratic legitimacy, because, I think, it’s really at that kind of conceptual level that we need to think with a bit more nuance about what democracy requires of us and what we should require of a democracy.
So, having said that, let me just lay out for you, I think, really 4 different kinds of criticisms that we find of referenda in the literature. And here I’m trying to draw together thoughts from political science or social sciences, social choice theory. Also, I guess, if you like, democratic theory or normative political theory. So let me just go through these, and I’ll try to be brief because I don’t want to speak for too long tonight, but it’s a bit of a litany. So bear with me.
Illusion of popular control
So I think the first point that I wanted to raise is that we often think that referenda give us popular control over decision making. But there’s a difference between popular choice and popular control, and popular choice doesn’t necessarily equal popular control.
And the reason why that’s the case is that before there’s a referendum, there’s a decision, firstly, to go to a referendum, and then there’s a decision about what the question will be. And we don’t have control over either of those things so often – it’s certainly in the New Zealand political system – whether there is a referendum is almost entirely a matter of political discretion.
So the government of the day can decide whether an issue is the kind of issue that needs to be put to a referendum or not, and it has the ability to set the terms of the referendum. And we can expect that we’ll get a referendum on a topic when there’s some kind of political advantage seen by some political actors in doing so, and the mere fact that we don’t have a choice over when there’ll be a referendum or not, is part of the problem here. So we may, for instance, see efforts to revive something like the Treaty Principles Bill through a Citizens Initiated Referendum. I’m not close enough to the politics to know whether that would happen or not, but certainly for those who want to advocate for the Treaty Principles Bill, or something similar to it, the next sort of avenue to pursue after the Bill was rejected through the Parliamentary process, is to try and get some kind of Citizens Initiated Referendum on the topic.
The other aspect, then, is also the question of how the referendum is phrased. What question is posed to the public, and, if you have the ability to write the question, you’ve got quite a lot of influence over how the referendum will go. So again, if we go back to the Australian Republic Referendum, despite the fact that there was quite a lot of popular support for a republic, the referendum was defeated, in part because of the way that the question was posed to the voters. So there was a particular model of what the Republic was going to be – I won’t go into the details but it involved Parliament electing essentially a President, and the President would need to be elected by a two-thirds majority. And the reason why even some Republicans voted against the Referendum was because they didn’t like the details of that particular proposal.
And there’s a general principle here which is, if you want a referendum to be defeated, you just pack in as much detail into the proposal as you can, and then everyone will find something about it they don’t like, and so they’ll vote for the status quo.
So that’s just a couple of ways in which popular choice doesn’t necessarily mean popular control.
Illusion that majorities are in favour
The second issue which I wanted to mention was to do with social choice. So there’s a there’s a branch of political theory called social choice theory. Mathematicians love this stuff. The social choice theory is about how collectives can make a group choice.
And when we have referenda, what we’re always posed with is a binary choice. Typically it’s the status quo versus some new proposal. And it gives the impression that there is a majority in favour of one or another of those options. And if you pose a binary choice, you will get a majority for one or the other option.
But of course, a binary choice inevitably simplifies the policy issue that’s at stake, and as soon as you add a third option, or a fourth option or a fifth option, you realise that actually, oh, what we thought was a majority in favour of this thing was only a majority because there were only 2 options on the ballot. And so, if you have 3 or 4 or more options, actually, opinion can quickly split among those, and it becomes apparent that you don’t have a majority for any one particular course of action.
And this actually leads to some pretty deep questions about what it is for there to be the ‘will of the people’ or a popular choice, which is another topic perhaps for another time. But just to say that observations like this actually lead some political theorists to question whether there is any meaningful sense that can be given to something like the ‘will of the people’.
Yeah, so just to quickly recap, hopefully you heard the first two ideas. The first one is that the referendum gives us popular choice, but not control over the decision making. And the second point was that in a referendum we’re given a binary choice between two options, and that can give the false sense that there’s a majority in favour of something when if we look at a range of options, actually, you see that majority falls away.
Circumstances not right for making a good choice
Okay, so then the third point is the rather depressing results of social scientists who look at how much knowledge we have on the issues that are posed to us as voters, and most of the study is done on electoral voting. But similar results hold for referenda.
Unfortunately, the very common theme of this research is that often we, as voters, are mistaken about what it is we’re voting on. We tend to have little knowledge about the choices that are posed to us. And, I think, we saw this in the End of Life Choice Act Referendum in 2020, and in the legalisation of marijuana referendum. Even people who were highly educated and supposedly politically savvy didn’t necessarily have their heads around the details of the proposals. And so there are worries that what we’re asked to do as voters in referenda is sort of, to some extent, beyond us.
But that, in my view, is not quite right. I mean, there’s often a quick kind of elitist conclusion that’s drawn that really political decision making needs to be left with those who are knowledgeable. And there can even be kind of anti-democratic inferences drawn from data around political ignorance and political irrationality. But this, I think, gets it wrong.
We, as voters, are intelligent. We can make informed decisions. The evidence from things like citizens assemblies show that ordinary citizens in the right context can synthesise complex information, can deal-negotiate trade-offs pretty competently. The problem with referenda is that we’re asked to make complex political judgments in circumstances that are not at all conducive to our doing a good job with it.
So, the kind of classic analysis of this comes from an economist and political scientist called Anthony Downs, who talked about the paradox of voting and the basic idea in his work is that as the number of people involved in a vote goes up, the chances that we, as an individual are going to make any impact upon the outcome goes down until our vote is statistically insignificant. And when that’s the case, there’s very little incentive for us to put in the time and the effort to learn about political issues, to be informed and to take care with how we exercise our individual vote. And I think we see that kind of pattern playing out with referenda as well.
So that’s the third point. So the first one was about the illusion of popular control. The second one is to do with the illusion that there are majorities in favor of outcomes. And the third one is to do with what I would describe as a kind of flawed division of labour where we are asked to make an important political decision under circumstances that are not conducive to our putting in the effort and the time to making a good choice.
Tyranny of the majority
And then the fourth point, very briefly, is probably the one that first comes to mind, which is the tyranny of the majority. And so there’s always a danger that when we ask, we give political power to all of us together, that there will be important considerations and interests of minority groups that are not respected by the majority. And so the mere fact that there’s a majority in favour of some kind of policy choice doesn’t mean that it’s the right thing to do to follow that policy choice.
And an obvious example here is something like indigenous rights, or human rights more generally, where these, I think, we should treat as moral obligations on our political society, and even if it were the case that there were a majority in favour of violating those rights, it would be the wrong thing to do to follow that. So, that, I think, is, in some ways, the most obvious objection that comes to mind.
Okay, so that’s probably enough on the reasons why we should be a bit skeptical, I think, when it comes to referenda.
Why democrats might feel uneasy about not supporting referenda
Let me just say something about why, it seems to me, we feel a tension with that conclusion … that this seems, sort of, a bit … we’re a bit hesitant to draw this kind of conclusion. It feels kind of anti-democratic to say that you have worries about the use of referenda. Well, why is that?
You have your own intuitions about this, I’m sure, but I think … it seems to me that we have a very deeply held kind of notion of democracy which is built around what a theorist named Jeffrey Green calls the ‘vocal model of popular power’. And the vocal model of popular power has the idea that we, as a people, are a kind of decision-making entity, and that we have the right to exercise the power of self-legislation.
And this kind of model of what democracy is, built on this vocal model of popular power, is pretty common to many of the major political theorists of the 18th, 19th and 20th century as well. It’s there in Rousseau. It’s there in Jeremy Bentham. It’s there in the Federalist papers. It’s there in John Stuart Mill. And it’s still in some ways the sort of received dominant model even in democratic theory today.
I think one of the appealing parts of it is that it fits very nicely with our kind of image of assembly democracy, where a community that exists locally is able to come together and make decisions in person through discussion, and, if necessary, through a kind of concluding vote.
And so it sort of fits together – it’s a coherent view of what democracy is. And it still has a lot of currency, I think, in the way that we think about democracy.
But in the modern era, it’s long been recognised that there’s a kind of dilemma, or even a trilemma, as it’s sometimes called, that we face in modern democracies.
So James Fishkin talks about the trilemma of democratic reform, which is the tension between three goods which we want to have all at once. So we want deliberative quality – we want quality, face-to-face conversation, we want everybody to participate and we want everyone to participate as equals.
And Fishkin suggests that: well, we can have probably two of those three things at any one time in a modern society. If we have mass participation, then it’s very difficult for there to be a quality of participation. If we have deliberation, then it’s very difficult to have mass participation and so forth.
So the sort of standard solution to that problem that we’ve kind of come to in the modern era is through representation. We have representatives participating in small bodies that deliberate and discuss and decide together, and we formalised the process of selecting representatives, which is where elections come.
So far so good but then, I think, this is the second reason why we are attracted to referenda is not just the vocal model of popular power, but also worries about electoral politics – worries about how well our elected representative bodies are doing at deciding policy questions and generating good government. We’re worried about illegitimate influence over elected politicians by the wealthy and the powerful. We are worried about bad lawmaking and bad policy making, things being rushed through Parliament, decisions being handed over to ministers who are potentially being swayed by donations or are perhaps incompetent at some level in what they’re doing. We’re worried about short-termism in parliamentary decision making and so forth, the short-term time horizons. So we have these worries about the democratic institutions we have. We think, well, actually, we’re a bit untrusting of that process. Maybe it will be better if we get to make the decisions ourselves. And I think that’s part of the appeal.
So those are two reasons, I think, why we’re attracted to referenda. But the worries that I just raised about parliamentary processes and the democratic system that we currently have, I think, alert us to some of the core democratic values that we want a democratic system to respect.
So it’s not just about popular control over decision making. It’s also about rigour in policy and lawmaking. It’s about the responsiveness to affected parties. It’s about transparency and accountability and checks against illegitimate influence. And so actually, I think – this is the key point here – that we have these worries about parliamentary democracy but on those kinds of measures, do we, as voting citizens in referenda, perform better on those measures? Is our decision making likely to have as good or better epistemic quality? Is our decision making likely to respond appropriately to the interests of affected parties? Do we have any kind of accountability and transparency in the decisions that we collectively make through referenda?
And I think the answer to all those three things actually is, no!
So when we sort of recoil about/against the inadequacies of parliamentary democracy, we should apply those same standards to ourselves if we are to sort of make decisions collectively through instruments like referenda. And I think we don’t stack up very well, actually.
So that’s not a reason just to say leave everything to Parliament. It’s an argument for thinking about how we can actually improve the quality of our democratic systems and ensure that they are trustworthy. And they’re making decisions that we, as citizens, can endorse as decisions that are well made.
Alternatives to referenda
Okay. So just finally, a couple of words then about alternatives to referenda. And I won’t spend very long on this – I’ll wrap up in a minute.
So one alternative to referendum that you will all be familiar with is the idea of a citizens assembly. And certainly, citizens assemblies, in my view, do actually score pretty well on some of the measures that I just mentioned. I think that there’s good evidence that citizens assemblies can make decisions that have good levels of knowledge, are independent from the influence of illegitimate influences like money and vested interests. And so that’s certainly a mechanism that I’ve been interested in for many years, and I know many of you have, too.
When it comes to really significant decisions like constitutional reform, whether we want to just put that decision in the hands of a citizens assembly or embed it in a broader process, a more multifaceted decision-making process, I think is something that needs consideration. And we can talk about that in the Q and A, if you like.
Another possibility is to try and upgrade referenda. And Simon mentioned John Gastil, who was in Aotearoa last year, and has done quite a lot of work on this. He was one of the architects of the Citizens Initiative Review, which is actually a participatory process a little bit like a citizens assembly, which is designed to accompany a referendum.
So the idea, again many of you will be familiar with this already, but the idea of a Citizens Initiative Review is that a small group of around 24 to 30 randomly selected citizens get together for 3 or 4 days to review the arguments for and against a referendum proposal. And they produce a document which summarises what they’ve learned about it. So the arguments in favour of it, the best arguments in favour of it, the best arguments against it, and then an indicative vote on how the members of that group would vote, intend to vote on the referendum. And that information is then circulated to the citizens who are asked to vote in the referendum. And it’s meant to give them some kind of guidance on how fellow citizens who’ve actually spent some time looking at the issue, see the merits of that particular decision. So that, I think, is a really interesting proposal.
I guess the final option is to have a kind of hybrid of some of these things. And as democratic theorists have thought more about the potential for random selection, citizens-assembly-type processes, there’s been more attention, I think, paid to the way that these things can kind of articulate together into chains of decision making or systems of decision making that, as a whole, look robust and and worth supporting.
So it might look like something initiated by Parliament, perhaps moving to a stage of national conversation, perhaps alongside a citizens assembly or citizens assemblies, working groups and leading back into some kind of parliamentary process, potentially. So there’s quite a lot of possibilities there that could involve participatory processes as well as parliamentary processes.
And it’s worth mentioning and remembering in this context, the independent working group that created the Matike Mai report under the leadership of Margaret Mutu and Moana Jackson. This is an example, I think, of a kind of hybrid process or an iterated process where there were many hui – this was back in 2015, I think, now – the series of hui among iwi, hapu, other indigenous organisations, thinking about the question of constitutional transformation. And the sequence of conversations were kind of recorded and analysed and turned into the final report. So we have a bit of a track record, actually, here in Aotearoa, of actually more elaborate systems, of sequences, of deliberation on political issues.
So those are just options. I’m not plumping for any one of them today. But I think that we should be turning our attention to these kinds of conversations.
So just to kind of wrap up really quickly. I guess what I’m saying is, if you think democracy means mass voting, and you think that referenda are slightly wobbly mechanisms to decide complex policy issues, you might be tempted to conclude that democracy is the problem, and democracy needs to be limited, we need to insulate government from democracy, we need 10% less democracy, as one book has it. But I think that would be a false move. We need to think innovatively about what our democratic systems look like. We need new and more robust mechanisms of political decision making that can claim democratic legitimacy because of the way that they’re structured.
So yeah, I think I’ll leave it there. Thanks for your attention.
Questions and Answers
Question 1: Given the imperfections of referenda, do you think that there are sometimes political actors who promote referendums to achieve particular outcomes because they think they can manipulate the process?
Yes, I’m sure that’s true. And you know, when there is a referendum, it puts on the table a whole lot of new avenues to try and influence the decision. We saw this in The Voice to Parliament Referendum in Australia. Right, it’s going to a referendum, now let’s kind of get our act together and scupper this thing, right? And so the political actors get into gear during the lead up to the referendum. And, in fact, some of the working group who were putting together the proposal – The Voice to Parliament – said, look, we really can’t go to a referendum on this unless there’s cross-party support, because they knew that if there wasn’t cross-party support, that, you know, the knives would be out, and that it would be a messy affair, and it certainly was. And so they were reassured by Anthony Albanese that no, no, we’ll go ahead anyway. But, yeah, it was pretty grim and depressing.
So … and the decision to go to a referendum itself can be done for all sorts of reasons. You should expect political actors to make decisions based on what they are trying to achieve, right? They’re partisan actors who have particular outcomes that they’re wanting to achieve and they’re going to do what they’re going to do. Sometimes we’ll agree with those goals, and sometimes we won’t.
Question 2: The binary yes-no framing of the referendum is a significant problem. Binary framings pervade our political institutions and limit the possibilities for learning and the expansion of possibilities. What can we do about this?
The construction of a binary choice means that at the end of the day you can say: look, a majority voted for this. But it massively simplifies complex questions. I think the received wisdom among democratic theorists is that you deliberate first and then you vote. If you skip that deliberation phase, then you skip the opportunity to expand the conversation, to consider new options, to find proposals that will actually respond to a number of legitimate concerns and interests.
So … We have mechanisms for doing that in our existing political system.
One thing which we shouldn’t underestimate is the importance of the ongoing public conversation. One of my favourite democratic theorists, Jurgen Habermas, talks about democracy working on two tracks. So there’s the track of how we talk about things and what we think in the public sphere, and that inevitably influences the more kind of narrow track of institutionalised decision making because the options that are on the table, the things that are seen to be viable, the things that are within that kind of Overton window of sensible options, is shaped by public discourse. And so we do need to remember the role that public conversation has.
And writing – the kind of writing that Max [Rashbrooke] does, for instance – is part of that public conversation, shaping opinion, shaping what issues people care about. And even without electoral mechanisms or formal mechanisms, those public conversations do shape political decision making over time. And that’s another reason why we should care about things like public funding of media, the availability of local journalism, that there are spaces of genuine critical conversation within the media environment, which we’re losing, actually.
Question 3: How might citizens assemblies be used? Would they be used instead of a Royal Commission of Enquiry, certain parliamentary processes or even of referenda?
I guess this is one of the big debates, which is going on in the democratic innovations space at the moment, is what kind of place citizens assemblies and other deliberative mini publics have. Should they be empowered to make final decisions or should they merely be bodies that give recommendations? How should they be sequenced with other kinds of democratic processes like referenda? I guess, you know, if you buy the criticisms that I was making of referenda, then it would be slightly odd to take a rich, deliberative process and then hand over the final decision to a referendum.
I think the way that we’ve typically thought about referenda, particularly on constitutional questions, is a kind of ratification. So we have some kind of deliberative process which comes up with a new constitution or an amendment, or what have you? And then we put it to a referendum as a kind of ratifying procedure. I think, there’s some kind of validity to that concept, but it’s still going to be the case, that the decision is sort of hostage to the decision making of a mass society with pretty patchy knowledge and engagement with the issue. So I’m still a little bit hesitant even at that constitutional level. To say no, no, what you need to do is go to a referendum for final ratification.