Recently, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani called for a national referendum in his country on several of his key policy proposals. In the Iranian governmental system, a referendum can only be triggered by an overwhelming vote of the Majlis (the Parliament) in favor of setting up such a vote. In fact, the original decision for Iran to become an Islamic Republic was a consequence of a referendum at the outset of the Islamic Revolution. Iranian voters had a Sophie's Choice (same year the film was released incidentally) between having an Islamic Republic or having a monarchy. Hopefully, if the Iranian people were able to vote in referenda in the Rouhani era, they would have better choices than that one.
This news sparked a discussion among some of my friends regarding what it would look like if the United States had a mechanism for a national referendum. No such tool exists in our constitutional and legal framework. On the other hand, states do have ballot initiatives and referenda -- a reform that grew out of the Progressive Era of the early 20th century. In fact, in the 2014 midterm elections, voters in many states utilized these initiatives and referenda to vote in favor of raising the minimum wage in their states, among other policy items, such as stricter gun laws. Notably, in the 2012 elections, Colorado and Washington voters went to the polls to legalize marijuana in their states. Several states have either banned or legalized same-sex marriage through such a process too.
The merit of such efforts is heavily disputed in the political world. It is true that some states have utilized such measures to get out ahead of the federal government on key issues, such as the aforementioned topics. States are often said to be the "laboratories of democracy." This point is usually trumpeted by conservative-minded thinkers but it is also often embraced by progressives too when they seek to achieve policy goals that are elusive at the federal level. Nevertheless, the detrimental effects of referenda and initiatives are all too real and vivid in our history. In 2004, 11 states voted to ban same-sex marriage on the same day George W. Bush was reelected president. In California, where the state government is required to balance the budget like in other states, residents voted against tax increases and against cutting spending thus tying up the hands of their legislators. In 1858, the notion of "popular sovereignty" in the Kansas-Nebraska Act was ultimately harmful to the country and to the cause of abolition of slavery.
The experience we have with these efforts begs us to ask the question of what it would be like if there were federal initiatives and referenda? The fact of the matter is that, in a federal republic like ours, there is no doubt that the people rule. The Declaration of Independence makes clear that "governments are instituted among Men" -- that government only derives its power "from the consent of the governed." Our country is undoubtedly stronger because of this core foundation upon which it is built. Our nation is freer, more inclusive, and greater because of the sacrifices, speech, and activism of generations of movements of real people who continually fought for the expansion of civil rights and civil liberties. Further, our relatively transparent, democratic, and fair election and voting process, albeit flawed in numerous ways, is still something to behold as genuinely admirable. People ought to have the right to choose their leaders (which should include abolition of the Electoral College) and representatives.
Nevertheless, there is a key reason why the Founders explicitly established indirect democracy in the United States. Their central intent was to ensure that, while voters had a say in sending representatives to Congress and that they had a role in the presidential election, the actual policies would be formulated by elected officials, who would ideally gain knowledge from research and expert advisers. Their basic thinking was sound in that their fear of the heat of the moment and power of special interests overtaking public sentiment was fairly reasonable. Of course, such pitfalls occur in the current legislative process anyway, as seen in legislators' rush to broadly expand national security powers after 9/11, for instance. However, if voters do not like the policies that legislators pass in such moments, they ought to vote out those legislators in the next elections -- a power they already hold -- rather than have a chance to craft the policies themselves.
If voters were given the chance to shape the specific policies in referenda and initiatives, the result may not be pretty. In the current elections process, voters already, according to the Campaigns and Elections political science textbook, do not engage in proximity voting, that is, voting based on policies. Voters, often by their own admission, usually do not have, by and large, the expertise, knowledge, interest, and time to comprehensively analyze and research extremely detailed and complex policy issues. If voters do not already engage in policy-based voting in presidential and congressional elections, as is well documented in political science research, is there any evidence to suggest that they would engage in such voting in referenda and initiatives, which are policy-based?
Further, the political debates of our modern history suggest that that if some of those issues that dominated discussion were put to vote nationally, the result would have been detrimental to the country's progress. When the Civil Rights Act was polled in 1964, only a relatively slim majority of Americans (54 percent) told pollsters they favored its adoption, according to a Harris Survey poll analyzed by the Roper Center on Public Opinion Archives at the University of Connecticut. Such a poll result makes one wonder if the bill would have passed if it came to a national referendum rather than in Congress.
Also, given the virulent opposition the legislation faced in the segregated South, where poll taxes and other obstacles made voting unnecessarily difficult for blacks, it is very likely the Civil Rights Act would not have passed in this climate in a national vote. More recently, in the opinion of a wide range of expert economists, the Recovery Act was successful in preventing a second Depression and in creating or saving millions of jobs. Nevertheless, the federal stimulus package was not very popular at the time of its passage -- an unpopularity that only grew by the 2010 midterm elections. If the legislation were put to a national vote, rather than a vote in Congress, it may not have passed and the country would be worse off because of it.
Ultimately though, voters, to their credit, did not defeat Presidents Johnson and Obama for these efforts, demonstrating that, although they may not have agreed with some of their specific policies, they gave their leaders the benefit of the doubt. Therefore, the fact that voters ought not to have the power to vote in referenda and initiatives is not necessarily an indictment of their judgment, intelligence, and attitudes. In fact, as evidenced in many states' initiatives recently, voters are often ahead of their politicians in terms of many important issues.
In the end, the best argument against such a proposal was made in a 2010 Columbus Dispatch editorial, written by election law professor Leah Sellers. She convincingly argued that though a national referendum could be a positive development, it ran the risk of "unleash[ing] 'the tyranny of the majority,'" which founding father James Madison warned against in The Federalist Papers. Beyond that, as GW political science professor John Sides noted recently, there is no evidence to suggest that voters are particularly mobilized to turn out and vote in high numbers when states have referenda and initiatives.
Sides noted that the evidence is lacking that particular issues excite enough voters to increase turnout in a meaningful way; states that passed various initiatives and referenda in 2014 still had low voter turnout anyway, similar to those states without them. Therefore, if a national mechanism existed, it is unlikely that voter turnout would be particularly higher for a given policy matter or that voters would be especially mobilized by specific issues. If anything, the worst actors in our political process may exploit the process.
It is easy to imagine a national referendum on environmental protections being subject to the will of voters who either, on the one hand, voters who do not even consider any economic costs and, on the other hand, those voters who do not recognize climate change as real. When a topic like the environment is instead left to policy experts in the EPA, which is run by an administrator who answers to the President (who answers to the people who voted for him!), those kinds of existent checks and balances and nuances are sufficient for progress. Indeed, as aforementioned, such checks and balances even include the ability of voters to actually vote out their members of Congress in the next election if they do not like the policies. Arguably though, for the sake of the country, it is probably not the best idea to have a mechanism for national referenda and initiatives.
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