Glossary

Keywords

referendum, Centre for Research on Direct Democracy (C2D), direct democracy, report, worldwide

For more details on the Referendum Database, please refer to the RDB codebook (Brüggemann 2023).

Ballot date

Date on which at least one referendum was held in a polity. In our analysis, we oftentimes analyze ballot dates instead of referendums in order not to artificially inflate the number of referendums in certain countries. In some constitutional referendums for example, each article of the constitution is voted on individually. This means that the vote on each article is counted as an individual referendum.

In general, differentiating between referendums and ballot dates entails a few tradeoffs:

  • If we look at single referendums, the danger is that we count different response options to the same question as distinct events.

  • If we only look at unique ballot dates per country, we solve this problem. However, we also lose distinct referendums that took place on the same date.

Ideally, we would include an additional variable in the Referendum Database denoting if referendums taking place on the same date belong together or if they are distinct. Until this linking variable has been implemented, we analyze ballot dates also in the Swiss context.

In Switzerland, the Federal Chancellery fixes four dates per year on which all national and subnational referendums are held (Bundeskanzlei 2024). Please note that we tally ballot dates for cantonal votes individually per canton. For example, when Aargau holds a cantonal vote on the same day as Zurich, this will be counted as two cantonal ballot dates in our database.

Canton (CH)

Subnational entity of Switzerland. 26 cantons together form the Swiss Confederation (Kley 2016).

Citizen (CH)

Enfranchisement in Swiss referendums varies over time and space. At the national level, women’s suffrage was only introduced in 1971, voting age 18 in 1991. Today still, some citizens are excluded from voting because of a disability. Cantonal and even municipal enfranchisement rules can differ from the national rules. For example, Jura and Neuchâtel allow foreigners to vote in cantonal referendums; Glarus allows citizens to vote from the age of 16 (Dermont 2021; Poledna 2022). Enfranchisement of Swiss national living abroad also varies between cantons.

Country

In this report, we treat as “countries” those territorial units that hold referendums independently. Excluded from this are sub-national entities, such as federal states in the USA or cantons in Switzerland. Territories differ from federal states in that they may have a certain degree of autonomy, but they do not have the same extensive rights as federal states or provinces. As an example serves Greenland, which belongs to Denmark. Although Greenland is not a province in its own right, it has far-reaching rights of self-determination. For example, the Greenlandic population can also decide on their own independence by referendum.

We rely on the classification into territorial units, based on the ISO 3166 standard that includes independent countries, territories and regions of geographical interest. Furthermore, ISO 3166-3 is used for historical countries that no longer exist.

Landsgemeinde (CH)

The Landsgemeinde is a gathering of all enfranchised citizens of a canton to elect officials and pass laws. Some Swiss cantons have a Landsgemeinde tradition going back to the Middle Ages. Since the founding of the Swiss Confederation in 1848, almost all Landsgemeinden have been replaced with referendum democracy. Zug and Schwyz abolished the Landsgemeinde in 1848, Uri in 1928, Nidwalden in 1996, Appenzell Ausserrhoden in 1997, and Obwalden in 1998.

Today, only the cantons of Appenzell Innerrhoden and Glarus still hold a yearly Landsgemeinde (Stadler 2021). In these two cantons, all enfranchised citizens meet once a year to vote on a wide range of issues. Elections and votes at cantonal level are held by a show of hands. The Landsgemeinde is regarded as the supreme authority of the respective cantons, although it does not replace parliament or the ballot box. The exact number of votes in favor of or against a proposal can only be estimated and cannot be determined precisely. This is also why these votes are excluded from this analysis.

Legal basis

Several authors have identified the legal basis as an important aspect of referendums (Suksi 1993; Gallagher 1996; Setälä 1999; Altman 2017). In the RDB, legal basis can take on the following values:

  • non-official: The referendum type has no legal basis.
  • ad-hoc: The referendum type has a legal basis which was specifically created for it.
  • official: The referendum type has a legal basis that wasn’t specifically created for it.
Legislature period (CH)

The legislature period is the length of a parliament before new elections are held. The National Council has a four-year legislature period. It begins and ends with the constituent sitting of the newly elected parliament, which is held in December after each national elections (The Swiss Parliament 2024).

Postal voting (CH)

In Switzerland, postal voting was introduced in 1994 at the national level. Today, it is the most common form of voting (Serdült 2024, 212). It is estimated that the introduction of postal voting increased turnout by around 4 % (Luechinger, Rosinger, and Stutzer 2007).

Referendum instances

In the RDB, we use the term referendum to refer to “[…] any popular vote on an issue of policy that is organized by the state or at least by a state-like entity, such as the authorities of a de facto state” (Mendez and Germann 2016, 144).

Regime type

For regime type, we refer to the Regimes of the World (RoW) classification developed by the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project (Coppedge et al. 2023). This classification divides countries into the following four types, according to the competitiveness of access to power (polyarchy) and liberal principles:

  • closed autocracy
  • electoral autocracy
  • electoral democracy
  • liberal democracy

Additionally, we also use data compiled by Freedom House (2023) for robustness checks.

Topic

The political topic that a referendum is held on. The topics are organized on a three-tier hierarchy which was developed together with Swissvotes, the Institute of Federalism of the University of Fribourg and the Section Politics of the Federal Statistical Office. More than one topic can be assigned to an individual referendum.

Turnout

Share of registered voters participating in a referendum.

Trigger type

The way the referendum is triggered:

  • automatic: The referendum is triggered by a constitutional/legal requirement.
  • top down: The referendum is triggered by an institution of the political elite like the monarch/president/government, the parliament, a territorial unit, the UN or another institution.
  • bottom up: The referendum is triggered by citizen demand (e.g. a signature collection).
Type

The institutional type of direct democracy which the referendum is an instance of (Kriesi and Bernhard 2014):

  • mandatory referendum: A referendum that was automatically triggered by certain legal conditions, usually found in the constitution.
  • optional referendum: A referendum on a law passed by parliament that came about because the required quorum of citizen opposition was met (usually a certain number of signatures) within a specified period after the law was passed.
  • governmental referendum: A referendum launched by the government/executive or parliament/the legislative.
  • citizens’ initiative: A referendum launched by citizens, usually via a signature collection.
  • counter proposal: A counter proposal by the government or parliament to a citizen’s initiative.

At the cantonal level in Switzerland, the referendum type could be further differentiated (Degen 2016; Bätschmann 2017):

  • In addition to the constitutional initiative, some cantons also know the legislative initiative, in which the object of the initiative is a cantonal law.
  • In addition, some cantons also provide for the financial referendum, and diverse forms of administrative referendums.
Waves of democratization

For the World of Referendums Report, we aim to show how many and which types of referendums have occurred over different time periods. For these time periods, we refer to the original work done by Huntington (1993) and refined by Lührmann and Lindberg (2019).

World region

To categorize countries into world regions, we rely on the United Nations (UN) geoscheme which subdivides all countries into up to three different grouping tiers based on the UN M49 area code hierarchy.

See the documentation of the R function rdb::add_world_regions() for further details.