Could referendums defuse political polarization?

The recent referendum in Kansas (in which 59% of voters “decided against removing the right to abortion from the State Constitution”) made me think about the general idea of referendums as a way to defuse political polarization.

This came up a few months ago around the time of the Supreme Court decision, when we discussed abortion attitudes in Oklahoma. According to Pew Research, 51% of adults in Oklahoma say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, and 45% say illegal in all or most cases—but when the state legislature considered a bill that “prohibits abortion from the moment of fertilization,” they voted 73 to 16 in favor.

The extreme vote in the legislature, so starkly different from the balance of public opinion in the state, is not a shock. As I wrote at the time, it does not defy political gravity for a legislature to vote in a way different from public opinion: issues are bundled, the whole thing is tangled up with national politics, also there’s some sort of pent-up demand from activists who can push anti-abortion legislation in a way that they could not do for fifty years. So, lots going on.

The point is that voters don’t have many options. If you want to vote Republican, you pretty much have to choose anti-abortion. Polarization in action.

A referendum, though, opens up more possibilities.

The role of referendums in a representative democracy is not always clear. Sometimes political scientists have opposed referendums on the grounds that they sidestep the political process. A referendum just gives you one choice, but on a complicated issue, legislators have staffs and can evaluate, deliberate, and find a compromise solution.

Given this, I can think of three reasons to have referendums on major policies:

1. Political polarization. As in the Oklahoma abortion example, sometimes a legislature can’t or won’t “evaluate, deliberate, and find a compromise solution.” That’s fine—it’s not the legislature’s job to compromise on an issue that they favor by a 73-16 margin—but it’s a failure from the standpoint of representing the popular will.

2. Principal-agent problems. A few decades ago, California had successful referendums on taxes and term limits. These are two issues where legislators of both parties are, to some extent, interested parties: tax cuts reduce the government’s power, and term limits threaten to remove people from the legislature entirely. So an extra-legislative solution can make sense.

3. Finally, it’s a safety valve: the threat of referendum can motivate a legislature to action.

I’m not saying that referendums are absolutely necessary: in a functioning democratic system, officeholders can ultimately be removed from office by the voters. But, given the general view that politics in the United States is too polarized, it might be worth considering the value of referendums as a force for moderation.

Having said this, I guess we should consider the opposite position, which is that referendums can increase polarization, with the example of the Brexit vote in the U.K. And, hey! here’s a research article, “Divided by the Vote: Affective Polarization in the Wake of the Brexit Referendum,” by Sara Hobolt, Thomas Leeper, and James Tilley, who write of “affective polarization, not by partisanship, but instead by identification with opinion-based groups.” I guess the difference is that British politics is not polarized by party in the same way as politics in the U.S. Yes, voters have strong party allegiances in Britain, as they have in the U.S. for a long time—but strong party ID is not the same as political polarization. Consider, for example, the U.S. in the 1950s.

Anyway, I think the topic is worth further research.