Referendums and Ethnic Conflict

By Matt Qvortrup

Although referendums have been used for centuries to settle ethnonational conflicts, there had yet been no systematic study or generalized theory concerning their effectiveness until Matt Qvortrup's Referendums and Ethnic Conflict. Qvortrup's study filled the gap with a comparative and empirical analysis of all the referendums held on ethnic and national issues from the French Revolution to the 2012 referendum on statehood for Puerto Rico. Drawing on political theory and descriptive case studies, the scholar created typologies of referendums that are held to endorse secession, redraw disputed borders, legitimize a policy of homogenization, or otherwise manage ethnic or national differences. He considered the circumstances that compel politicians to resort to direct democracy, such as regime change, and the conditions that might exacerbate a violent response. Qvortrup offers a clear-eyed assessment of the problems raised when conflict resolution is sought through referendum as well as the conditions that are likely to lead to peaceful outcomes.

This updated and revised edition includes a new introduction bringing the general field to the present, as well as new specific sections on Scotland (2014), Catalonia (2017), and the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom (2016). The original work's political framework now also covers the literature on identity politics, online campaigning, the regulation of social media, and how referendums are used increasingly as populist devices. This edition also updates referendum results through the end of 2020.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Apr 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9780812298581

Matt Qvortrup

Professor Matt Qvortrup is Chair of Politics at The Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen and an adjunct Professor of Political Science at the University of New South Wales, Sydney

Book preview

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

This book is about identity politics and referendums. When the first edition of this study was written, the former term was almost unheard of, and referendums on these matters were in the main only the concern of anoraks such as yours truly. This changed. The rhetoric of ethnic identity combined with referendums on nationalist issues led to the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom in 2018, as well as votes on independence in, among other, places Scotland (2014) and Catalonia (2017). Not all of these cases were driven by the same ideology. The ethnic nationalism of, respectively, Donald Trump in America and Boris Johnson in the United Kingdom is miles apart from the civic nationalism espoused by Scotland’s Nicola Sturgeon, though perhaps not that different from the nationalism of the Junts pel Sí party, which campaigns for Catalonian independence from Spain. But, in any case, both types of nationalism are indicative of a growth of identity politics, a kind of politics that sees cultural and historical attachment as being more important than economic issues.

In recent years, political economists have coined the term analytical narratives, that is an analysis that combines analytic tools that are commonly employed in economics and political science with the narrative form, which is more commonly employed in history (Bates et al. 1998). Identity politics—of the sort that gave rise to independence referendums (including the Brexit vote)—can be analyzed using this approach (see also the early study by McLean 2003).

As I have argued elsewhere, the Brexit vote was an example of what economists call an inelastic good (Qvortrup 2016). Viewed from the perspective of economic theory, the Brexit referendum was thus a choice between economic security and sovereignty, and that is true for perhaps all referendums on national issues and self-determination.

Each of these two options, respectively elastic and inelastic goods, have what economists call different demand curves. The price of each had implications for the voter’s decision. According to the classic definition as provided by the neoclassical economist Alfred Marshall from his Principles of Economics (1890),

We may say generally: the elasticity (or responsiveness) of demand in a market is great or small according as the amount demanded increases much or little for a given fall in price, and diminishes much or little for a given rise in price.… [T]he only universal law as to a person’s desire for a commodity is that it diminishes … but this diminution may be slow or rapid. If it is slow … a small fall in price will cause a comparatively large increase in his purchases. But if it is rapid, a small fall in price will cause only a very small increase in his purchases. In the former case … the elasticity of his wants, we may say, is great. In the latter case … the elasticity of his demand is small. (Marshall 1890: 166)

Put differently, an elastic good, following Marshall’s definition, is one where a slight change in price leads to a big change in the quantity demanded. Conversely, an inelastic good is one where even a considerable change in price has a negligible effect on the quantity demanded. The contention (or hypothesis) here, then, is that the two options—respectively, Brexit and Bremain—were, respectively, inelastic and elastic goods. And the same, more generally, goes for cases of identity politics versus bread-and-butter issues. Applied to the case of Brexit, the main argument proposed by those who wanted to leave the European Union (EU) was sovereignty: "It was clear from the start that we wanted a people’s campaign. We wanted to focus on sovereignty. ‘Take back control’, ‘I want my country back’, that [sic] sort of slogans. They are priceless. Who does not want to get his [or her] country back?"

This is a quote. The man who uttered these words was Gerry Gunster, an American political consultant who ran the campaign for Leave.eu (personal communication with the author 6 July 2016). His argument—though he did not put it in the jargon of economic theory—was that some voters are willing to accept virtually any increase in economic costs as long as they can take back control. In his own words, sovereignty is priceless.

In economic terms, sovereignty can—following this logic—be seen as an inelastic good. As in the aforementioned definition, a good is inelastic when a change in the price leads to a negligible change in demand for it. For example, a chain smoker will keep buying cigarettes almost no matter how expensive a pack of Benson & Hedges or Marlboro becomes. And a committed football or baseball fan will, no doubt, continue to buy a season ticket even though the price rises exorbitantly.

So, too, with Brexit (and independence): even an increase in the price—as predicted in countless reports by the International Monetary Fund, HM Treasury (the British ministry of finance) and others—would only lead to a negligible change in the demand for taking back control—or so it turned out.

Of course, we cannot prove the logic of this analytical narrative in the strictest sense of the word. But the logic was certainly not lost on Nigel Farage. The stockbroker turned politician told the Euroskeptic Daily Express: The wellbeing of those living and working in our country matters to me more than GDP figures (Daily Express 17 June 2016). Farage may not have considered his prediction in the jargon of economic theory, but the logic was clear. An increase in the cost of living—or, as voters saw it, a change in abstract macroeconomic figures—would be a small price to pay for freedom (Farage’s word for leaving the EU).

The British government’s document HM Treasury Analysis: The Immediate Economic Impact of Leaving the EU had claimed that each voter—according to econometric estimates—would be £4,000 worse off in 2030 if Britain voted to leave the EU, and a vote to leave would cause a profound economic shock, creating instability and uncertainty, which would be compounded by the complex and interdependent negotiations that would follow (HM Treasury 2016: 1).

However, the Treasury’s prediction was, arguably, too abstract for many voters—and, more to the point—many voters were receptive to and convinced by the £350 million a week claim (the suggestion by the leave campaign that Britain paid this amount to the EU every week). These voters believed the claim that this money could be spent directly on public services like the National Health Service. It was a strong emotional argument, and one that only becomes stronger if analyzed in the light of economic theory.

It was clear that organizers of the campaign to stay in Europe wanted to push the economic argument. And they had good reasons for doing so. Opinion polls suggested that many voters—indeed, a majority—believed that Britain would benefit economically from staying as a member of the European Union (Financial Times 3 May 2016: A3). The problem for the remain side was, economically speaking, that the welfare argument was a classic example of an elastic good. A small change in the price of Bremain and the demand for staying in Europe would go down.

Nevertheless, the economic argument—and the perceived benefits of staying in the EU—presented a problem for organizers of the leave campaign. Without any economist of note on their side they faced an uphill struggle. They resolved this by resorting to the aforementioned claim that UK taxpayers transferred £350 million a week to the European Union.

The government and HM Treasury—it should be noted—dismissed this claim, as one would expect. But the assertion was also dismissed by the UK Statistics Authority, whose chair, Sir Andrew Dilnot, in unequivocal terms denounced the assertion. The Treasury Committee in the House of Commons also condemned the claim that Britain was transferring this amount of money to the EU, noting that the real figure was closer to £180 million a week.

The problem for the remain side was that many voters accepted the £350 million a week figure or at least the gist of the argument. Voters totally internalized the argument when we used it in focus groups. When they were told that the figure was inaccurate, they would say, ‘yes, but it is still a substantial amount,’ and we would get nowhere, said Lord Cooper, Prime Minister David Cameron’s pollster (Lord Cooper, interviewed by the author, 6 July 2016).

In economic terms, as soon as the cost of Brexit was believed to be rather minimal—or perhaps even positive—the demand for leaving the EU went up.

The remain campaign had done rather well in the first week after David Cameron called the referendum; they had been able to control the agenda and had argued that the price of leaving the EU was high. Once this claim had been effectively disputed by leave campaigners like Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, and Nigel Farage, the support for leave increased, and demand for continued membership dropped significantly.

In economic terms, Bremain was an elastic good: the perceived change in price had an immediate impact on the demand. When the price of EU membership was claimed to be £350 million a week, demand for EU membership fell. The fact that this claim was acknowledged to be fanciful by Nigel Farage within hours of the referendum makes little difference. Esse est percipi—what is, is what is perceived, the philosopher George Berkeley (1685–1753) famously noted. Or, in Lord Cooper’s more downbeat assessment: The other side had the best lines and the best lies (Lord Cooper, interview with the author, 8 July 2016).

Of course, in other referendums, the position was different. The EU was an emotive issue and a very inelastic good. Scottish independence was not an inelastic good, except for some hardliners. It was recognized that the price was very high, and the famously thrifty Scots were more concerned with pennies and pounds than with putting a kilt on things, as the local phrase goes.

So much for analytical narratives. And now back to the second edition of the book. Writing after the very high-profile referendums (and at a time when identity politics is the dominant theme in everyday debates) this new edition of this book analyzes how national identity and democracy have combined and clashed in the past 230 years.

The book is unashamedly a scholarly treatise. It seeks to establish positive and scientific theories of why various referendums on identity politics are held—but it also analyzes when they are lost and won. In Chapter 7 of the book I develop a statistical model that can predict the outcome of European referendums. This model, I might add, was developed before the 2016 Brexit referendum, which I predicted in an article published four months prior to the vote (Qvortrup 2016).

However, this is not just a political science book. Being a lawyer by training, as well as a political scientist by profession, I could not resist delving into the finer points of regulation and litigation. Hence the book contains chapters on when referendums are permissible in domestic and international law.

Furthermore, the book has an extended section in Chapter 8 on the regulation of referendums. Unlike the first edition, the book looks at how online campaigning and the use of algorithms have been abused to target voters (e.g., during the Brexit referendum). Some have seen it as almost inevitable that we fall prey to these tactics. As the chapter on regulation below shows, this is not the case. Many countries regulate and limit the use of online targeting. Democracy needs regulation to remain fair. This book shows how.

Referendums and identity politics can be dangerous bedfellows. And referendums are far from unproblematic. They need to be used with care. But so do many other useful devices from cars to chainsaws. Like many other valuable things, referendums require understanding before they are used. This book contributes to this understanding. And can, I hope—directly or indirectly—help improve the use of this democratic device.

Nationalism and the craving for self-determination are not universally loved, but they are not likely to go away. Whether you condemn or endorse this trend, it is imperative to understand it.

Introduction

The core problem in political theory is that fundamental and equally axiomatic principles often collide. A paradox can almost be defined as a clash of two equally incontestable maxims of truth. Two such truths are (1) that each nation has a right to determine its own affairs and (2) that the majority has a right to govern. Admittedly these rights are tempered by the recognition that no nation and no majority may ride roughshod over minorities. But this caveat notwithstanding, national self-determination and majority rule are principles to which few fundamentally object. Indeed, defending the reverse positions would appear politically absurd. But the problem is that the two principles often are incompatible. To understand why, it might be useful to consider a distinction used in ancient Greek. The Greeks made a distinction between the people as a nation (ethnos) and the people as a body of citizens (demos).

In the classical city-state—or polis—the two were congruent, and in some present-day nation-states, such as Norway and Luxembourg, the same is broadly true. But more often than not, the two concepts are in conflict. To take an example, a small-town English politician, the Conservative councilor Rob McKella from Corby in Northamptonshire, believes that people in England should be given a right to vote on Scottish independence. After all, he argues, the voters are citizens in the United Kingdom and collectively constitute the demos. However, most people in Scotland, by contrast, believe that only people living north of the border should be allowed to vote as these people—perhaps alongside Scots living in the diaspora—constitute the ethnos and hence have a right to self-determination. As will come to be obvious, these two worldviews, both based on solid arguments, do not combine. That the local politician from the Midlands in the United Kingdom took an interest in this was not accidental. Corby was known as Little Scotland, and in the 1930s the former steel town saw a massive influx of Scottish workers.

This book is about this conflict between the ethnos and the demos, and about the problems that are raised when solutions to ethnic and national issues and conflicts are sought through referendums. Its main focus is on determining when different kinds of referendums on ethnonational issues occur and also on determining if they lead to exacerbation of conflict or the opposite—if balloting can stop bullets.

Referendums have often been perceived to be incompatible with nationalism. William Sumner Maine—a conservative writer from the end of the Victorian age—once mused that democracies are quite paralyzed by the plea of nationality. There is no more effective way of attacking them than by admitting the right of the majority to govern but denying that the majority so entitled is the particular majority which claims the right (Maine 1897: 88).

This book looks at these conflicts through a comprehensive study of all the referendums held on ethnic and nationalist issues from the French Revolution to the 2020 referendum on independence for New Caledonia.

It is a controversial topic. Some scholars have supported these referendums on the basis of philosophical conviction and because they believe that they confer legitimacy upon decisions made by elites. Jürgen Habermas, for example, took this view. In light of resentment following new boundaries after the cold war he found that referendums on sovereignty issues—given certain safeguards—could be "a way of proceeding which permitted a broader discussion and opinion formation as well as a more extensive—and, above all, better prepared—participation, which would give the voters the eventual responsibility for the process (Habermas 1996: 12). If the people were given the responsibility through referendums, they would not be able to complain later on, as it would have been the people’s own mistake that they would have had to cope with" (Habermas 1996: 12). These issues are interesting and important from a philosophical point of view, but they are ultimately issues for political theory and not the primary concern of the comparative and empirical political scientist. Hence these normative issues are not the focus of this study. The questions I look at are positive issues of when and why referendums on various national and ethnic issues occur.

These polls have played an important role in attempts to resolve ethnic conflicts for centuries. But it is fair to say that scholars of ethnic and national conflict—as well as political scientists—have had reservations about these plebiscites and referendums. Michael Gallagher, writing about the experience in Europe, concluded that the referendum is least useful if applied to an issue that runs along the lines of a major cleavage in society (Gallagher 1996: 246), and recently Jonathan Wheatley wrote about the disruptive potential of direct democracy in deeply divided societies (Wheatley 2012: 64).

While critical, Wheatley was not as dismissive of referendums as Roger Mac Ginty, who noted, The principal problem with referendums in situations of profound ethnic conflict is that they are zero-sum, creating winners and losers. Simple majoritarian devices do little to help manage the complexity of conflict. Instead, they validate the position of one side and reject that of another. Often, they do little other than delimit and quantify division (Mac Ginty 2003: 3).

This interpretation may have been correct in the case of the 1973 Border Poll in Northern Ireland (Osborne 1982: 154) and, indeed, in the case of many of the referendums held in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s (Terret 2000). But Mac Ginty’s conclusion that the blunt reductionism of a referendum (for example the perception that a conflict is about a line on a map and little else) (Mac Ginty 2003: 3) is perhaps a little bit cavalier and perhaps ignores the fact that the Schleswigian conflict, which caused two wars between Denmark and Germany, was resolved by a referendum (Laponce 2010: 24). Indeed, Sarah Wambaugh noted in her much-quoted study Plebiscites Since the World War that the plebiscite was so fair and excellently administered that the Schleswig question, which caused three wars in the 19th Century and rent of councils of Europe for some seventy years, has ceased to exist (Wambaugh 1933: 98).

A referendum is admittedly unlikely to work on its own, and referendums have been followed by violence (the case of East Timor in 1999 comes to mind)—and, indeed, even the Brexit referendum in Britain in 2016 was marred by the murder of an MP! But this does not prove that the referendum is to blame. Indeed, there are examples of the opposite, including the peaceful poll in Eritrea in 1993 (on secession from Ethiopia).

Just as we can find contrasting empirical examples, we can also find contrasting academic assessments. Some, such as Ben Reilly, maintain that despite hollow claims that the ‘will of the people’ must prevail, it is only the most obtuse interpretation that could recommend building peace this way (B. Reilly 2003: 184), while others, notably Arend Lijphart, take the view that the potential of calling the referendum … is a strong stimulus for the majority to be heedful of minority views (Lijphart 1999: 231).

We have a welter of empirical evidence, but so far there have been no systematic study, no developing of hypotheses, and no general theories. One of the aims of this book is to alter this state of affairs. It is surprising that this task has not been undertaken before. The ethnonational referendum has been around for a long time, and it is still popular. From the Swiss referendum on independence from Bonaparte’s France in 1802 (and before that Avignon’s incorporation into France in 1791) to more recent referendums on power sharing in Northern Ireland in 1998, autonomy for East Timor in 1999, and statehood for Puerto Rico in 2020, voters have been called upon to decide ethnic issues. There have been more than two hundred of these referendums, and their outcomes have decided the fates of people and peoples from Malta to Micronesia and from Mongolia and Montenegro to Montreal.

Some have been held in despotic—and indeed totalitarian—regimes (like the Anschluss Referendum in 1938 in Austria), others have been held in countries with impeccable democratic records such as Switzerland (Jura), Denmark (Greenland), and Canada (Nunavut). This geographical spread, and the fact that the same institution has been used across different countries and by very different types of regimes, make these referendums both puzzling and challenging.

Although they are never far from the media news stream,