Boyer - Forcing choice: the risky reward of referendums

Understanding How to Enhance Our Democratic Life

It is a pleasure to write a foreword for Patrick Boyers new book on referendums. This book brings together much of the scholarship that informed the authors three earlier works on this subject and updates his account of the politics of referendums. This new volume includes discussion of the recent debate we have had in Canada about the need for a referendum to legitimize changing the electoral system. Boyer also has interesting things to say about the surprising (and, for many, disturbing) results of the Brexit referendum in the U.K. and the referendum on the peace process in Colombia.

Indeed, Patrick Boyer is without doubt the doyen of referendum scholars in Canada. No other Canadian has written so much and so thoughtfully on this subject. My own discipline, political science, has largely neglected researching the use of referendums in Canada. This has not prevented political scientists from having strong views, for and against, the use of referendums. But these views are usually based on a few referendums that are thought to have turned out well or badly, or on a simplistic admiration or revulsion of referring issues to the public.

That is how I thought about referendums myself, until I went to school with Patrick Boyer. His resourceful scholarship and careful analysis puts these simplistic views about referendums or plebiscites (he teaches us that there is really no difference between the two any longer, at least in Canada) to shame. His work shows that referendums are woven into the fabric of our democratic life. While there have been only three Canada-wide referendums (prohibition, conscription, and the Charlottetown Accord), we have had hundreds and hundreds of them maybe thousands at other levels of government (including aboriginal governments), and we have used them to resolve issues as disparate as marketing agricultural products and drawing new boundaries in northern Canada.