11. Agenda Problem in Referendum Democracy

Representative democracy may be criticized either because it is seen as incompatible with democratic equality in principle, or because it tends to produce undemocratic results in practice. Correspondingly, there are two influential defenses of representative institutions. According to the competence argument, we cannot expect citizens to be sufficiently virtuous, intelligent, interested, or well informed to make decisions that concern the good of the whole people. According to the practical argument, direct democracy is not practicable in large and complex polities like our modern states. Both arguments have their problems. This article presents a third argument. It is based on the crucial role of agenda (in the wide sense of the term) in all decision making. Referendum democracy, which is often considered to be a better approximation of the (unattainable) ideal of direct democracy in the modern conditions, is especially vulnerable to the agenda problem. Most referendums are organized in a dichotomous way. If voters’ preferences over some issues cannot be broken down as a series of yes-no choices, the outcomes of referendums may be manipulated by combining and separating issues.