Draw Breath

Thanks to Pete Baker for synopsising the results of the research (pdf) on the motivations of no voters in the Lisbon referendum. If the research is sound, it seems that 42% of no voters and 48% of abstentions were motivated by a feeling of ignorance about the treaty. Now, this has motivated some bizarre commentary on Slugger, with some twat arguing that the complexity of the treaty was itself a plot by 'the EU' to baboozle voters into a yes vote (a wonderful mix of paranoia and Irish narcisism there).

Now, I'm exposing myself to accusations sour grapes, since I advocated a yes vote, butI would have thought that voting no or abstaining because the treaty is too complex is not somehow a vote against complex law or something (consolidated laws, which is what Lisbon largely is, tend to be very very complex). Are the electorate really sending a message that law should be simpler?

Voting no or abstaining because of ignorance is voting against being asked (at least in the one-off referendum). So we should either stop asking and leave it to the professionals or should ask in a very different way. 

First off, I actually agree with John Maguire in today's Irish Times, at least to the extent that running a referendum and then discovering (correctly in my view) that Crotty v. An Taoiseach (wikipedia) wasn't so sweeping after all. If you run a referendum and don't like the result, higher principles are at stake if you seek to undermine it.

At the same time, I don't see how it's 'perverse' to say that some decisions are better left to the people we hire to make them. Sneering at that idea undermines the whole notion of representative democracy. We hire politicians to represent and it's a worrying sign that we then resent them doing that when they have the time (and at least some have the experience) to figure out what's in the national interest and what's not.

If we don't like that, we at least have to recognise that, while questions that can be synopsised as 'do you want divorce?' are worth asking, the message of the poll seems to be that several hundred pages revising and updating half a century's treaties is not amenable to asking a yes-no opinion of people who are not trained treaty-readers. It's not elitism to say that people didn't understand what they were being asked: it's what over 40% of them told the pollsters (and that's not counting the 4% who thought we were voting on losing a commissioner etc).

The only way I can see us doing this by referendum properly is to take each stage of a treaty like Lisbon and ask an individual question for each one, or at least for each one that contravenes Crotty (as in, involves a transfer of sovereignty). Imagine: a couple of hundred referendums in one day. Or we could isolate the sovereignty transfer stuff, argue about that and vote on it clause by clause. The polity as committee system. Trés democratic!

Certainly the current arrangement is just senseless. It undermines representative democracy and replaces it with something worse.

Update: I see Mick has posted on this over at Brassneck. I think I agree with him that we could do with shooting the messenger. That is, that the government was 'indolent.' At the same time, I'm slightly sympathetic to government parties. They raise money to fight elections (er, mostly) and are now expected to fight for government policy too (against well (if mysteriously) funded rivals. Perhaps we should think of state funding of both sides in referendums?  Even with that, however, we all work on the assumption that complex documents like Lisbon can and ought to be synopsised onto a leaflet. I'm not sure that's either possible or desirable.

Where I disagree with Mick is over his suggestion that "the success of the NO campaign was in prompting Irish citizens to look more closely at the document in order to ask themselves what it all meant." The no campaign was obviously successful but in Sinn Féin's case some of their and-a-pony wishlist reveals that they either don't understand the treaty themselves or don't care what's in it. Libertas barely stayed this side of disingenous (not that the government was much better). Their success was not in 'prompting people to look more closely at the document' but in encouraging people to despair of the whole thing.