Rediscovering Referendums: Direct Democratic Practices in Postwar Western Europe

Abstract

According to historians of postwar democracy, the democratization processes that characterized Western Europe after the Second World War were mainly marked by a move towards more indirect democracy. In this image, powerful parliaments, strong political parties, and a limited influence of the population on the decision-making process were the main characteristics of these so-called “restrained democracies.” In reality, however, most Western European countries knew extensive debates on direct democracy, especially on the political means of the referendum. This subsequently resulted in varying levels of integration of the referendum into the national ideas and practices of democracy. This begs the question as to why it was incorporated at an early stage in some Western European states, like France, while in others it was only introduced at a later moment or not at all, like in the Netherlands.

After analyzing the institutional development of the referendum, the stance on referendums of political elites, and the public evaluation of the referendum in both countries, I argue that in France, the referendum was mainly reintroduced in the postwar period as a result of the positioning of the Gaullist political movement, which saw the referendum as a useful political tool to circumvent parliamentary obstructions. In the Netherlands, the initial refusal to introduce referendums in the direct postwar period was the result of a lack of political urgency for democratic renovation, which can partly be explained by the different wartime experiences between the two nations. From the late 1960s onward, however, a public call for a more direct form of democracy became ever stronger in Netherlands. This call even resulted in a short-lived referendum experiment in the early twenty-first century.

By showing that referendums and discussions on direct democracy were an integral part of the postwar political process in both France and the Netherlands, this thesis moves against the dominant historiographical notion that there was a general sense of agreement on what democracy was supposed to look like in postwar Western Europe and that this was a model of purely indirect democracy. In this light, the thesis proposes the investigation of direct democratic practices and ideas as a new lens for researching postwar democracy.