The Strategic Use of Government-Sponsored Referendums in Contemporary Europe: Issues and Implications
Sidebar
Main
Abstract
Referenda, especially those which are not constitutionally mandated, have often been used strategically in the context of both democratic and non-democratic regimes by political actors wishing to achieve specific goals. Engaging with the extant literature on the subject, this article analyses four government-sponsored referendums which took place between 2015 and 2016 in Greece, Britain, Hungary and Italy. The focus of the analysis is twofold. The first purpose is to debunk the political risk calculation underpinning the government’s decision to sponsor a referendum in each of the cases considered. The second is to suggest that the strategic use of referendum by governments in contemporary Europe can be better understood if read in light of the recent upsurge of populist movements.
Details
Referendum, European Union, Political Risk.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Material published in the JCER is done so under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence, with copyright remaining with the author.- Articles published online in the JCER cannot be published in another journal without explicit approval of the JCER editor.
- Authors can 'self-archive' their articles in digital form on their personal homepages, funder repositories or their institutions' archives provided that they link back to the original source on the JCER website. Authors can archive pre-print, post-print or the publisher's version of their work.
- Authors agree that submitted articles to the JCER will be submitted to various abstracting, indexing and archiving services as selected by the JCER.
