Be Careful What You Wish For: Regulating Referendum Campaigns

In recent years, democracies around the world have begun to turn increasingly to referendums in order to engage citizens and lessen the distance between government and the governed. There has been a diffusion of guidance on good practice on the regulation of referendums with proposals from the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe and the Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), among others. Campaign regulations in particular have proven controversial in many countries with changes often emanating from court rulings (Spain, Ireland and Denmark). The variety of regulations offers welcome opportunities to study the political effects of these rules under a range of institutional settings. But first it is necessary to agree a framework for evaluation. We propose an index of campaign regulation which classifies all of the various campaign regulations into four clusters and we provide an initial empirical application to establish a basis for investigating the extent of the campaign regulations which have been adopted. Having established a picture of cross-national similarities and differences in regulatory environments, the paper will go on to explore some of the major questions which arise in relation to how regulations matter, specifically, what impact do they have and do they influence referendums or other political outcomes. Using case studies from Irish referendum campaigns, the paper will present a preliminary response to these questions and suggest avenues for further exploration of the issues involved.