Yes or No to what?

Referenda, and elections of all kinds, have been going on for a long time and have been the object of extensive academic study in various countries over the years. One major finding that has emerged from successive studies is that votes should not be taken at face value.

Voters for a party do not necessarily support (or even know) what that party stands for, and the choice between Yes or No in a referendum may be made on the basis of many factors other than the substantive issue on the ballot paper.

It is clear from a number of studies that although referenda might be thought to allow for the unadulterated expression of the popular will, in practice they are prone, like elections, to the influence of political intermediaries.

A significant intermediary is the political party, and most studies have testified to the importance of party allegiance as a factor in people's choice in a referenda. Roy Pierce and Henry Valen ("Referendum voting Behaviour", American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 27, No. 1, 1983) expressed the point firmly in their comparative study of referenda in Britain and Norway on EC membership in the 1970s.

These studies confirm that partisan attachments, when taken in conjunction with the regularity with which that same factor shows up in referendum studies, are almost surely the primary factor in referendum voting. Partisan identification plays the same primary role in referenda that it does in general elections.

I believe this tendency was evidenced by the opinion poll conducted for this paper by Professor Mario Vassallo (The Sunday Times, January 26). A major finding was that there is a very close alignment between voters' intentions in respect of the EU issue and party allegiance. Some 47.7% said they would vote for joining the EU, compared to 42.7% who said they would vote PN in a general election. Considering that Professor Vassallo found that almost 18% were still undecided while almost 12% declined to express an opinion, however, one must treat the results with a certain caution.

It is also not uncommon for referenda to produce results apparently at odds with the findings of polls taken in the months before a referendum. The rationale for assuming that referenda give a true picture while opinion polls do not, appears to be based on the notion that some opinion polls may relate to a sort of fuzzy idea while referenda have to do with concrete steps needed for the idea to take on reality.

In Malta's case, according to this view, voters who might be favorably disposed towards the idea of joining the EU might nevertheless balk at the specific steps embodied in the Union's acquis communautaire (all 85,000 pages of it) and the package negotiated by the Maltese government as presented by the Labour Opposition (a 'pittance' of Lm4.5 million in cash and 'hordes' of Europeans pushing property prices sky-high or 'stealing' our jobs).

As long ago as 1971, Ronald Inglehart ("Public Opinion and European Integration", Europe's Would-be Polity, European Integration, Prentice-Hall, 1970) suggested that while the sorts of questions asked about European integration tapped deep-seated political values and orientations, any particular question, as put in a referendum, could and quite probably would be influenced also by short term considerations.

Arguably, the voting in referenda on this issue might be better understood as a response to the immediate circumstances of the situation, including the party political context of the vote, rather than as a manifestation of deep-seated views on EU.

Take the Maastricht referenda in Denmark and France. There are strong indications ("Referendum Outcomes and Trust in Government: Public Support for Europe in the Wake of Maastricht," Mark N. Franklin (Universities of Houston and Strathclyde), Cees van der Eijk (University of Amsterdam), and Michael Marsh (Trinity College, Dublin), West European Politics, Vol.18, 1995) that on those occasions voters did not in fact give vent to feelings about Europe but rather rendered a verdict on the general performance of their governments.

If this was indeed the case, then it can well be argued that referenda conducted in the context of national party politics, with the government of the day urging ratification of a treaty or agreement they themselves have negotiated, will inevitably be contaminated by popular feelings about the government.

Popular governments will get votes in favour of referenda that they propose. Unpopular governments will be slapped on the wrist. The conjunction of a referendum and a general election within a relatively short time-span in Malta will make this factor even more relevant. The Labour Opposition is exploiting the situation to the full, combining criticism of the membership package (stuff for the referendum) with accusations about the Government's fiscal insolvency (stuff for the general election).

While in the two countries which have most experience of referenda - Switzerland and the United States - referenda are generally proposed by citizens rather than governments (there are some exceptions to this in Switzerland), in most countries it is governments who are most clearly identified with the decision to hold a referendum and governments who almost invariably call for a Yes vote. As a consequence, the government is perhaps the real object of many referenda and while a popular government might expect to see its referendum proposals approved, an unpopular government will often see such proposals turned down.

One of the striking features of the 1992 referenda on Maastricht, of course, was the fact that in all countries most parties called for a Yes vote. Nevertheless the votes were close in France and Denmark. However, in many cases parties were in reality divided; and as Pierce et al. also point out: "when parties divide, so do their followers".

Parties have a strong impact only when they are united. Partisan attachments in parliamentary systems are inextricably entwined with government popularity, so that the outcome of a referendum has to be seen in connection with the position taken by the government. Particularly when public opinion is ill informed (amazingly, almost 30% in Professor Vassallo's survey said so) and convictions are shallow, opinions can switch easily under the influence of salient factors. In a parliamentary regime nothing is more salient to voters than the standing of the government, and any government proposal is coloured by this fact.

Various governments have paradoxically contributed to their difficulty in 'selling' the European project by perpetuating the illusion of national sovereignty down the years. Governing parties have often tried to present themselves both as bringing home the bacon from the European cornucopia as well as defending the national interest against incursions from Brussels.

In our case, the Nationalist government boasts about the Lm81 million in funds and cash obtained through 'tough negotiations', blessed by Günter Verheugen's statement that we got 60 times more per head than what we would get under the MLP's partnership proposal, at the same time that it emphasises that it is not Brussels' vassal, having obtained 'recognition' of our neutrality and transitional arrangements regarding property purchases by EU nationals.

The irony, however, is that in maintaining the illusion of national sovereignty beyond the point at which the truth could be hidden from voters, politicians in European countries may have come to appear impotent to affect the course of events in Brussels.

In Malta's case, we had the famous remark by Parliamentary Secretary Edwin Vassallo to the effect that, "when I want something done I tell my colleagues that that is what Brussels wants". The Labour Opposition has repeated this remark ad nauseam and, observing this, many voters may draw the natural conclusion that if Brussels is going to dictate pervasively then we had better not form part of Brussels.

At the same time, because national parliamentary debate has often been bypassed, the recent debate excepted, Opposition politicians - even any who agree about the benefits of European unity - are given an incentive to take advantage of the disaffection of voters regarding Europe.

Another point which emerged from the studies of the various European referenda was that while people could accept and even support the vague ideal of a European Union, the concrete realities often provoked opposition, as they did in the first referendum about the Nice Treaty in Ireland.

European integration, which initially involved the 'negative' activities of removing tangible barriers to trade, has now become more 'positive', involving the construction of joint policies in ever more salient areas.

The Maastricht and Nice Treaties contained a number of specific commitments to such policies, which would lead both to a larger and a more visible role for European policy making as these policies came to have an increasingly visible impact on everyday life.

Some will have been against the idea of a single currency, some against the idea of a central bank, some against a unitary defence policy, and so on.

Of course different groups will also have been in favour of different components. In such a situation, politicians seeking agreement will carry out a log-rolling exercise, and develop a package which offsets the components groups they do not like with others that they do like.

This is how the Single European Act and the Maastricht Treaty were constructed, but the log-rolling all occurred at an elite level between groups that could understand how to balance costs against benefits. Presenting such a solution for mass consumption is a different matter altogether. At a popular level it may well be that putting the elements of a package together involves the risk of losing support for the package as a whole. In this way, permissive consensus might give way to squabbling divisiveness.

There is no doubt that we are seeing this in Malta as well. The Labour Opposition wants us to believe that EU membership is intrinsically connected to the notion that a few hundred individuals, the likes of Dr Simon Busuttil, Dr Joanna Drake and other officials and consultants who could hope to land jobs in Brussels, will benefit from the largesse or excesses of the Brussels behemoth, while the great majority of the Maltese will labour under the heavy yoke of EU compliance.

Prime Minister Fenech Adami unwittingly played the game by declaring that he hopes nobody will envy those few hundred individuals the financially-lucrative deals they will land! The question of EU membership is surely made of weightier stuff.

The Nationalist government quite cunningly came up with a referendum question which omits any reference to the package negotiated by it. This betrayed both a certain sub-conscious defensiveness about its ability to defend the package as well as a realisation that undue emphasis on the package may detract from the appeal of the notion that we should "belong to Europe".

But the Government remains uncertain about its tactics, and is still trying to play both themes. Time will tell whether it would have been better to let the package speak for itself, so to say, and exploit to the hilt the natural inclination of all Maltese, be they Nationalist or Labour, to feel "European". Dr Sant displayed a keen fear of this risk when he recently emphasised that we do not need to join the EU in order to be European.

To conclude, certainly there is little indication in the findings from the various studies conducted that referendum outcomes should be regarded as necessarily bringing the independent judgment of the electorate to bear on issues of constitutional and political importance. That they do so on some occasions seems undeniable. That they do so at all times seems manifestly impossible.

More generally, the findings throw into question the entire rationale of referenda conducted in parliamentary democracies. If referendum results are so regularly coloured by the standing of the government that proposes them, then their use to ratify government policies will in many cases be little more than a gimmick that simply restates the approval of the government whose policies they are.

As Gordon Smith ("The functional properties of the referendum", European Journal of Political Research, Vol. 4, No. 1, 1976), has pointed out, a government will normally only initiate a referendum when it expects the outcome to be beneficial to it. However, in cases where a government is unpopular, but has no real choice about holding one, a referendum can tie that government's hands.

In preventing the enactment of major policy and constitutional changes by governments that lack electoral support, this brake on government freedom of action may be good for democracy.

Moreover, as long as referenda serve to confer a special legitimacy on government actions they may prove useful (as long as governments that call them make sure they are in good standing at the time).

However, regarding the result as anything more than a reflection of government support can be dangerous.