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The Palgrave Handbook of
European Referendums
Edited by Julie Smith
The Palgrave Handbook of European Referendums
Julie Smith
Editor
The Palgrave
Handbook of European
Referendums
Editor
Julie Smith
Department of Politics and
International Studies
University of Cambridge
Cambridge, UK
ISBN 978-3-030-55802-4 ISBN 978-3-030-55803-1 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55803-1
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher,
whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation,
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Acknowledgments
Somewhat counter-intuitively, this volume on direct democracy has its genesis

in an EU-funded network on parliamentary democracy in Europe: PADEMIA.
Over the lifetime of that network, two referendums in particular spurred me
to organise academic events. The first was the 2015 Greek referendum on the
EU bailout during the Eurozone crisis, which served as the catalyst for a panel
at the 2016 Annual Meeting of Pademia. The second was the now all-too-
familiar and well-studied UK referendum on membership of the EU, leading
to Brexit. Having co-organised with the Trans-European Policy Studies Asso-
ciation (TEPSA) a Pademia Roundtable on referendums in Europe following
that momentous event, I was contacted by Jemima Warren at Palgrave, who
enquired if I would be interested in editing a Handbook on European Refer-
enda. After discussing the idea and agreeing it could the Palgrave Handbook
on European Referendums in line with the usage by David Butler and others,
I agreed to do it. That was in the summer of 2016—it has been a long four
years punctuated by further referendums in various countries and two general
elections in the UK, not to mention a pandemic.
I am very grateful to the participants at the TEPSA-Pademia Workshop for
some very productive brain-storming, which helped shape the Handbook, and
to the three ‘anonymous’ reviewers of the proposal submitted to Palgrave, one
of whom was to become a contributor.
Thanks are due to the European Commission, which funded the Pademia
network (reference number: 540381-LLP-1-2013-1-DE-ERASMUS-ENW),
to TEPSA for organising the Brussels event and to Robinson College and the
POLIS Department in Cambridge for grants to allow us to run a Handbook
workshop in June 2018. On that occasion Claire Darmé and Julia Vassileva
both provided help as assiduous rapporteurs. Léonie de Jonge, in addition
to co-authoring a chapter, helped on the editorial side, as did Maria Chiara
Vinciguerra. I am grateful to them all.
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My greatest debt of gratitude, of course, is to all the contributors who have

made this book as fascinating as it is. It would be invidious to single out indi-
vidual authors, so I shall simply say how much I appreciate the advice given to
me at various stages of the process by some great figures in parliamentary and
referendum studies. It has been an honour to work with them.
The team at Palgrave has been fantastic throughout—thanks to Jemima
Warren, Oliver Foster, Nick Barclay and Rebecca Roberts, who have been
patient and professional at all times.
Finally, thank you to all my family and friends for putting up with a tired
and grumpy editor.
Cambridge Julie Smith

July 2020
Contents
1 Introduction 1
Julie Smith
Part I Referendums in Theory and in Practice
2 Referendums and Democratic Theory 29

Christopher Lord
3 History 49
Andrew Glencross
4 The Rules of Referendums 67

Alan Renwick and Jess Sargeant
5 Referendums and Parliaments 91

Philip Norton
6 The Shifting Will of the People: The Case of EU

Referendums 109
Ece Özlem Atikcan
7 Two Hundred Years of Direct Democracy: The

Referendum in Europe 1793–2018 137
Matt Qvortrup
vii
viii CONTENTS
Part II Domestic Referendums
8 The King Versus the People: Lessons from a Belgian

Referendum 165
Jan Wouters and Alex Andrione-Moylan
9 The Referendum Experience in France 179

Laurence Morel
10 The Referendum Experience in Switzerland 203

Uwe Serdült
11 The Scottish and Welsh Devolution Referendums of 1979

and 1997 225
Jörg Mathias
12 The 1998 Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement Referendums

in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland 247
Katy Hayward
13 The United Kingdom Parliamentary Voting System

Referendum of 2011 267
Andrew Blick
14 The Scottish Independence Referendum of 2014 287

John Curtice
15 The 2017 Catalan Referendum in Comparative Perspective 307

Matt Qvortrup
16 The Irish Referendums on Marriage Equality and Abortion 325

Theresa Reidy, Jane Suiter, Johan A. Elkink, and David Farrell
17 Referenda and Constitutional Change in Italy—The Failed

Change 343
P. V. Uleri
18 Luxembourg: The 2015 Referendum on Voting Rights

for Foreign Residents 385
Léonie de Jonge and Ralph Petry
CONTENTS ix
19 Turkey’s Constitutional Referendum: The 16 April 2017

Referendum in Historical Perspective 405
Ersin Kalaycıoğlu and Gülnur Kocapınar
Part III EU-Related Referendums
20 The Irish and Danish 1972 Referendums on EC Accession 429

Palle Svensson
21 Referendums: Norway 1972 and 1994 449

John Erik Fossum and Guri Rosén
22 In or Out of ‘Europe’? The 1975 and 2016 UK

Referendums on Membership 469
Julie Smith
23 The EFTA Enlargement 495

Lise Rye
24 EU Accession Referendums 513

Fernando Mendez and Mario Mendez
25 ‘If You Can’t Join Them…’: Explaining No Votes

in Danish EU Referendums 537
Derek Beach
26 The 2003 Swedish Euro Referendum 553

Henrik Oscarsson
27 Referendums on EU Treaty Reform: Revisiting the Result

in Second Referendums 563
Brigid Laffan
28 The French and Dutch Block the Constitutional Treaty 583

Claudia Sternberg
29 Swiss Votes on Europe 601

Clive H. Church
30 The 2015 Greek Referendum on Bailouts 625

Lina Papadopoulou
x CONTENTS
31 Hungary’s EU Refugee Relocation Quota Referendum:

‘Let’s Send a Message to Brussels’ 649
Agnes Batory
32 The Dutch Referendum on the EU-Ukraine Association

Agreement 671
Joost van den Akker
33 Issue Voting in Danish EU Referendums 695

Palle Svensson
Index 711
Notes on Contributors
Alex Andrione-Moylan, Ph.D. Fellow at the Leuven Centre for Global

Governance Studies, University of Leuven, Belgium. His research focuses
on populism and contestation in the EU and global governance. He has
published, inter alia, on the impact of populism in European Political Parties
(2018), on the G7 in times of antiglobalism and contestation (2018) and the
EU’s engagement with informal governance bodies (2019).
Ece Özlem Atikcan is an Associate Professor in Politics and International
Studies at the University of Warwick, and a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at
the European Institute of University College London in the UK. Her research
combines a theoretical focus on political campaigns, issue framing, lobbying,
transnational social movements and diffusion with a regional focus on the
European Union. Based on over 180 in-depth interviews with campaigners,
media content analyses and public opinion data, she studies EU referendum
campaigns to understand the impact of campaign argumentation on public
opinion. Her work has appeared in the European Journal of Political Research,
Journal of Common Market Studies, Journal of Elections Public Opinion
and Parties, Journal of Public Policy, Journal of European Integration, and
as books with Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press and
McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Agnes Batory is a Professor at Central European University School of Public
Policy, and a Research Fellow of the CEU Center for Policy Studies, Vienna,
Austria. Her recent publications deal with populism, participatory and collab-
orative governance and policy failure and compliance problems in the EU
context.
Derek Beach is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Aarhus,
Denmark, where he teaches case study methodology and EU politics. He has
authored articles, chapters and books on research methodology, referendums
and European integration, and co-authored the books Process-Tracing Methods
xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
and Causal Case Studies (both with University of Michigan Press). He has
taught qualitative case study methods at ECPR, ICPSR and IPSA summer
and winter schools, and numerous workshops and seminars on process tracing
methods throughout the world. He is also an academic co-convenor of the
ECPR Methods Schools.
Andrew Blick is Reader in Politics and Contemporary History, King’s
College London, UK. During 2010–2015, he was Research Fellow to the first
inquiry conducted by the UK Parliament into whether the UK should adopt a
written constitution. He was an assistant at the Prime Minister’s Office, No.10
Downing Street, in 1999. He is the author of numerous books, including
People Who Live in the Dark: The History of the Special Adviser in British Poli-
tics (2004); Beyond Magna Carta: A Constitution for the United Kingdom
(2015); The Referendum in Britain: A History (with Lucy Atkinson and Matt
Qvortrup, 2020 forthcoming); and Electrified Democracy: The UK Parliament
and the Internet in Historic Perspective (2021 forthcoming). He is editor, with
Roger Mortimore, of Butler’s British Political Facts (2018).
Clive H. Church is Emeritus Professor of European Studies at the Univer-
sity of Kent, UK. Educated at the University of Exeter and University
College London, he has taught at Trinity College, Dublin and the Univer-
sity of Lancaster. He has also been a visiting Fellow in several continental
Universities. His interests have moved from French history through Euro-
pean Union Studies to Swiss history and politics. He has been working on
these last since the early 1970s and has now produced four books The Poli-
tics and Government of Switzerland (Palgrave, 2004); Switzerland and the
European Union (ed.); (Routledge, 2007); A Concise History of Switzer-
land (with Randy Head) (CUP, 2013); and Political Change in Switzer-
land (Routledge/Europa, 2016), along with numerous articles, chapters and
reports.
John Curtice is Professor of Politics at Strathclyde University and Senior
Research Fellow, NatCen Social Research. He has written extensively about
political and social attitudes both across the UK as a whole and in Scot-
land in particular. He has been a co-editor of the annual British and Scottish
Social Attitudes survey series for over twenty years, and is a regular contributor
to British and international media coverage of politics and public opinion in
Scotland and the UK.
Léonie de Jonge is Assistant Professor of European Politics and Society at
the University of Groningen. She holds a Ph.D. in Politics and International
Studies from the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on right-wing
populism in Western Europe, with a particular focus in the Benelux region.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii
Johan A. Elkink University College Dublin, Ireland, specialises in quantita-

tive methods in political science, in particular spatial econometrics, and appli-
cations in democratisation and voting behaviour. He co-authored reports on
voting behaviour in the Irish referendums on the Lisbon Treaty and co-edited
The Act of Voting (2017). His work has appeared in the Journal of Poli-
tics, Comparative Political Studies, European Journal of Political Research and
Electoral Studies.
David Farrell, MRIA is Head of Politics and International Relations at
University College Dublin, Ireland. A specialist in the study of representa-
tion, elections and parties, his most recent books include: A Conservative
Revolution? Electoral Change in Twenty-First Century Ireland (2017) and The
Post-Crisis Irish Voter: Voting Behaviour in the Irish 2016 General Election
(2018). His current work is focused on constitutional deliberation. To date
he has advised and/or researched five government-led deliberative mini-public
processes (citizens’ assemblies).
John Erik Fossum is Professor at ARENA Centre for European Studies,
University of Oslo, Norway. He is project coordinator for the H2020-project
EU3D—Differentiation, Dominance, Democracy (2019–2023). Most recent
books are: Squaring the Circle on Brexit —Could the Norway Model Work?
(2018), with Hans Petter Graver; Diversity and Contestations over Nationalism
in Europe and Canada, (2018), co-edited with Riva Kastoryano and Birte
Siim and Towards a Segmented European Political Order, co-edited with Jozef
Batora (2020). Most recent articles are ‘European Federalism: Pitfalls and
Possibilities’, European Law Journal, (2017) 23 (5): 361–379; and ‘Norway
and the European Union’, Oxford Research Encyclopedia, Politics.
Andrew Glencross is Senior Lecturer at Aston University, UK, and Co-
Director of the Aston Centre for Europe. He is also a Senior Fellow of the
Foreign Policy Research Institute (USA) and an Associate Editor at ECPR
Press. He holds a Ph.D. from the European University Institute and is a grad-
uate of the University of Cambridge as well as a former Joseph Hodges Choate
Fellow at Harvard University. He is the author of several books, including Why
the UK Voted for Brexit: David Cameron’s Great Miscalculation (2016) and
has published research articles on many areas of European integration in jour-
nals such as the European Journal of International Relations, International
Affairs, and International Theory.
Katy Hayward is Reader in Sociology and a Fellow of the Senator George
Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security & Justice based at Queen’s
University Belfast, Ireland. She is a Senior Fellow of the UK in a Changing
Europe initiative, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, for
which she is working on the topic of ‘The Future and Status of Northern
Ireland after Brexit’.
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Ersin Kalaycıoğlu is a student of comparative politics at Sabancı University,

Istanbul, Turkey. He formerly served as the rector of Isik University, Istanbul.
He is a member of the Academy of Science, Turkey and also a member of the
Turkish Political Science Association, in both of which he also served as Exec-
utive Board member until 2017. He has authored, co-authored or co-edited
several books, most recently the Rising Tide of Conservatism in Turkey, co-
authored with Ali Carkoglu (2009), and has published several political science
textbooks and monographs in both English and Turkish. His articles have
appeared in such journals as Comparative Political Studies, Legislative Studies
Quarterly, South European Society and Politics, Southeast European and Black
Sea Studies and Turkish Studies.
Gülnur Kocapınar obtained her Ph.D. in Political Science from Sabancı
University, Istanbul, Turkey in 2019. Her research interests include party poli-
tics, political elites and recruitment, political party organisations, legislative
politics and Turkish politics. Her co-authored articles have been published in
journals such as Party Politics, Parliamentary Affairs, Turkish Studies, and
Political Research Quarterly.
Brigid Laffan is Director and Professor at the Robert Schuman Centre for
Advanced Studies, an interdisciplinary research centre at the European Univer-
sity Institute, Italy. The Centre’s mission is to contribute to research on the
major issues facing contemporary European society. Previously she was Vice-
President of University College Dublin and Principal of the College of Human
Sciences from 2004 to 2011. She is also the recipient of numerous awards:
in 2005 she was elected Member of the Royal Irish Academy and in 2010
received the Ordre nationale du Mérite from the President of the French
Republic. Her scholarship has been recognised by the THESEUS Award for
Outstanding Research on European Integration in 2012, and the Lifetime
Achievement Award for contribution to the development of European Studies
in 2014 by the University Association for Contemporary European Studies
(UACES).
Christopher Lord is Professor at ARENA, The Centre for European Studies
at the University of Oslo, Norway. He has written numerous books and journal
articles on democracy, legitimacy and the European Union, as well as problems
of differential integration. His current work includes attempts to rethink the
‘indirect legitimacy’ of the European Union as a means by which member state
democracies deliver their own obligations to their own publics.
Jörg Mathias is Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at
Aston University, Birmingham, UK. His current research focuses on regional
and local aspects of labour market management and social security provision
in West European countries.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv
Fernando Mendez is a Senior Researcher based at the University of Zürich,

Switzerland. Dr Mendez gained his Ph.D. in political science at the Euro-
pean University Institute, Florence, and works in various subfields of Political
Science (e.g. comparative politics, political behaviour and political communica-
tion). He has published extensively on direct democracy with much of his work
being interdisciplinary in nature and drawing on fields such as Comparative
Law.
Mario Mendez is a Reader in Law in the Department of Law at Queen Mary
University of London where he teaches constitutional law, comparative consti-
tutional law and EU law. His research on referendums includes a co-authored
monograph entitled Referendums and the European Union: A Comparative
Inquiry (CUP, 2014) and a co-authored study prepared for the European
Parliament entitled Referendums on EU Matters (PE 571.402, 2017).
Laurence Morel is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of
Lille, France, and member of the Centre de Recherches Politiques of Sciences
Po Paris (CEVIPOF). She has been Chair and vice-Chair of the IPSA/ISA
Research Committee on Political Sociology since 2014. Her publications in
English on referendums include: The Routledge Handbook to Referendums and
Direct Democracy, (2018) (ed. with M. Qvortrup); ‘Referendums’, in Sajo, A.
and Rosenfeld, M. (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Constitutional
Law, (2012) ‘Referenda’, in Badie, B., Berg-Schlosser, D. and Morlino, L.
(ed.) International Encyclopedia of Political Science (2011).
Philip Norton (Lord Norton of Louth) is Professor of Government, and
Director of the Centre for Legislative Studies, at the University of Hull. He
also serves as President of the Study of Parliament Group, Chair of the History
of Parliament Trust and Editor of The Journal of Legislative Studies. He was
elevated to the peerage, as Lord Norton of Louth, in 1998 and was the first
Chair of the House of Lords Constitution Committee.
Henrik Oscarsson is a Professor of Political Science, electoral studies, at the
Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He is
research director of the Swedish National Election Studies (SNES).
Lina (Triantafyllia) Papadopoulou is Associate Professor of Constitutional
Law at the ας ψηooλ oϕ τηε Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTh),
Greece. She has been a holder of a Jean Monnet Chair for European Consti-
tutional Law and Culture, and she is now the Academic Co-ordinator of the
AUTh Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence on ‘European Constitutionalism and
Religion(s)’.
Ralph Petry is a research specialist at the University of Luxembourg for the
National Contact Point Luxembourg in the European Migration Network
(EMN Luxembourg). He holds an M.A. in Social and Cultural Anthropology
from the University of Vienna and wrote his thesis on the 2015 referendum
in Luxembourg.
xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Matt Qvortrup is Professor of Political Science at Coventry University, UK.

Described by the Financial Times as ‘a world authority on referendums’,
he predicted the outcome of the Brexit referendum in an academic article
published three months before the vote. Professor Qvortrup has written several
books on the referendums, including A Comparative Study of Referendums
(2nd Edition 2005), Referendums and Ethnic Conflict (2014) and Government
by Referendum (2018). Professor Qvortrup earned his doctorate at Brasenose
College Oxford. In addition to his work as a scholar, Professor Qvortrup was
part of President Obama’s Special Envoy Team in Sudan in 2009–2010, and
he has been a constitutional advisor for more than 20 governments around the
world. He is also joint editor-in-chief of European Political Science Review.
Theresa Reidy is Head of the Department of Government and Politics, and a
senior lecturer at University College Cork, Ireland. Her research interests lie in
the areas of political institutions and electoral behaviour and her recent work
has been published in Electoral Studies, Parliamentary Affairs and Politics.
She is co-editor of the International Political Science Review.
Alan Renwick is Deputy Director of the Constitution Unit and Associate
Professor of British Politics in the Department of Political Science at Univer-
sity College London, UK. He has written widely on electoral systems, referen-
dums and mechanisms of deliberative democracy such as citizens’ assemblies.
His recent research has focused on the conduct of referendums, and he was
Research Director for the Constitution Unit’s 2018 Independent Commission
on Referendums.
Guri Rosén is Associate Professor at Oslo Metropolitan University
(OsloMet) and Researcher at ARENA Center for European Studies, Univer-
sity of Oslo, Norway. Her research focuses on political representation and
democracy in the EU, the European Parliament and interinstitutional relations
as well as EU external relations. Her work has been published in journals such
as Journal of European Public Policy, West European Politics and Journal of
European Integration.
Lise Rye is Professor of Contemporary European History at NTNU Norwe-
gian University of Science and Technology, Norway. Her research focuses
on European economic and political integration, with emphasis on EFTA-
EC/EU relations, the European Economic Area and Norway’s relations with
the EU.
Jess Sargeant is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Government, UK
where she conducts research into intergovernmental relations and the UK’s
exit from the European Union. She was formerly a Research Assistant at the
Constitution Unit, University College London where she worked with Dr Alan
Renwick on comparative research into the use and conduct of referendums
internationally, and on the Independent Commission on Referendums, which
was established to review the role and regulation of referendums in the UK.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xvii
Uwe Serdült is working as a professor at Ritsumeikan University, Japan, in

the College of Information Science and Engineering while keeping some
projects as a principal investigator at the Centre for Democracy Studies
Aarau (ZDA), University of Zurich, Switzerland. In these dual positions,
he teaches and does interdisciplinary research in several domains of e-
society. Within digital democracy he is especially interested in internet-based
platforms and tools for citizens (e-participation) as well as public administra-
tions (e-government) in order to enhance transparency and deliberation in
an information society. Regarding referendums he mainly works on Switzer-
land but is also interested to learn from most different political systems such
as Japan and Peru. At the ZDA Serdült and a small team maintain the
international referendum results database www.c2d.ch.
Julie Smith is Reader in European Politics at Cambridge University, UK.
As Baroness Smith of Newnham, she sits in the House of Lords, the upper
chamber of the British parliament. Her research focuses on democracy in the
EU and the UK’s relations with the EU, as well as the ever-changing topic of
the House of Lords and Brexit. Recent publications include: The UK’s Journeys
Into and Out of the EU: Destinations Unknown (London: Routledge, 2017;
paperback edition May 2018).
Claudia Sternberg is Principal Research Fellow at the UCL European Insti-
tute, University College London. She is the author of The Struggle for EU
Legitimacy. Public Contestation, 1950–2005 (UACES Best Book, 2014) and,
with Kalypso Nicolaidis and Kira Gartzou-Katsouyanni, of The Greco-German
Affair in the Euro Crisis: Mutual Recognition Lost?
Jane Suiter is Associate Professor in the School of Communications at Dublin
City University, Ireland. Jane’s expertise lies mainly in the area of the public
sphere; and in particular participation and political engagement. Her current
research focus is on disinformation and direct and deliberative democracy.
Palle Svensson is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Science
at Aarhus University, Denmark, and holds a doctorate from the same insti-
tution. He has written extensively on comparative politics, democracy and
political participation, in particular on referendums, including Folkets røst.
Demokrati og folkeafstemninger i Danmark og andre europæiske lande (The
Voice of the People. Democracy and referendums in Denmark and other Euro-
pean countries) (2003) and contributed to Direct Democracy: The Interna-
tional IDEA Handbook (2008).
P. V. Uleri has been lecturer in Political Science at the ‘Cesare Alfieri’,
University of Florence, Italy, where he taught courses on Political Parties
and on Democracies and Referenda. He has been co-editor and co-author of
Democrazie e Referendum and of The Referendum Experience in Europe. He is
the author of Referendum e democrazia.
xviii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Joost van den Akker obtained his Ph.D. degree in 2018 at the University
of Twente with a thesis titled Ruling the Referendum? European Integration
Challenged by Direct Democracy. He holds a Master’s degree in Analysing
Europe/Europastudien (M.A.) from Maastricht University/RWTH Aachen
University (2008) and a Master’s degree in European Law School (LL.M.)
from Maastricht University (2010).
Jan Wouters is Full Professor of International Law and International Organi-
zations, University of Leuven, Belgium, and Jean Monnet Chair ad personam
EU and Global Governance. Founding Director of the Leuven Centre for
Global Governance Studies and the Institute for International Law. Prof. Dr
Wouters is visiting Professor at Sciences Po (Paris), Luiss University (Rome)
and the College of Europe (Bruges) and Adjunct Professor at Columbia. Prof.
Wouters is a Member of the Royal Academy of Belgium for Sciences and
Arts and practises law as Of Counsel at Linklaters, Brussels. He is Editor of
the International Encyclopedia of Intergovernmental Organizations, Deputy
Director of the Revue Belge de Droit International, and an editorial board
member in ten other international journals. He has published widely on
international and EU law, international organisations, global governance, and
corporate and financial law. His most recent publications include The Commons
and a New Global Governance (2019), EU Human Rights and Democratiza-
tion Policies (2018), International Law: A European Perspective (2018), The
G7, Anti-Globalism and the Governance of Globalization (2018), The Faces of
Human Rights (2019), Changing Borders in Europe (2019), General Princi-
ples of Law and the Coherence of International Law (2019) and Parliamentary
Cooperation and Diplomacy in EU External Relations (2019).
List of Figures
Fig. 6.1 Three patterns of opinion change in referendums 111

Fig. 6.2 A selection of campaign posters from the French and Dutch
campaigns 114
Fig. 6.3 Campaign Posters in Maastricht, Nice and Lisbon Referendums 124
Fig. 7.1 Referendums in Europe 1900–1944 144
Fig. 7.2 Referendums by Regime Type 1900–1944 144
Fig. 7.3 Average number of referendums per decade in West European
countries 1945–1990 146
Fig. 7.4 Referendums in Western Europe by Type 147
Fig. 7.5 Referendums in Western Europe by Issue 1945–1989 153
Fig. 7.6 Types of Referendum in Former Communist Countries
1990–2018 154
Fig. 7.7 Types of Referendum in West European Countries 1990–2018 155
Fig. 7.8 Referendums in Eastern Europe by Issue 1990–2018 155
Fig. 7.9 Referendums in Western Europe by Issue 1990–2018 157
Fig. 7.10 Average Yes Vote (%) for Referendums 1945–2016 158
Fig. 10.1 Swiss national referendum topics over time (1848–2018) 207
Fig. 10.2 Frequency of referendum votes 1901–2018 213
Fig. 12.1 Percentage of supporters of the Agreement who had read it 255
Fig. 12.2 When voters made their minds up in the referendum
on the 1998 Agreement 260
Fig. 16.1 Referendum votes in Ireland, 1937–2018 327
Fig. 16.2 Turnout at referendums in Ireland 328
Fig. 17.1 Basic scheme for a typology of Italian referenda 354
Fig. 17.2 Levels of removal of the control over political decisions
operated by different types of referenda (Italian experience,
1946–2020) 355
Fig. 19.1 Results of 16 April 2017 constitutional referendum in Turkey
by region 414
Fig. 19.2 Results of 12 September 2010 constitutional referendum
in Turkey by region 415
xix
xx LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. 19.3 Results of 21 October 2007 Constitutional Referendum

in Turkey by region 415
Fig. 24.1 Diffusion of ‘accession’ referendums over time 528
Fig. 24.2 Comparisons of means with 95% confidence intervals for four
variables 529
Fig. 30.1 The ballot paper for the 2015 referendum 633
Fig. 32.1 Yes/No votes and turnout per party (%) 685
List of Tables
Table 4.1 Who can call a referendum in Europe’s democracies 71

Table 4.2 Citizen-initiated referendums in European democracies 73
Table 4.3 Electorate threshold requirements in European democracies 79
Table 6.1 Campaign characteristics and political setting 117
Table 6.2 Perceptions of the agenda-setting advantage 119
Table 7.1 Nationwide Referendums in Europe 1793–1900 139
Table 7.2 Italian Abrogative Referendums 1974–1990 152
Table 9.1 Nationwide referendums in France since 1958 185
Table 10.1 Referendum frequencies by decade, type of legal instrument
and success 209
Table 10.2 Swiss referendum votes on the national level, 2017–2019 215
Table 11.1 Results of the devolution referendums held in Scotland
and Wales, 1979 233
Table 11.2 Results of the devolution referendums held in Scotland
and Wales, 1997 240
Table 14.1 Support for independence by perceptions of the economic
consequences of independence 2011–2014 300
Table 15.1 Secession referendums 1944–1980 312
Table 15.2 Secession referendums 1991–2019 314
Table 15.3 Referendums in historic nations of Spain 1979–1980 317
Table 17.1 Constitutional referenda held according to Art. 138
of the Italian Constitution (1948–2020) 350
Table 17.2 Abrogative referenda in Italy (1948–2020) 352
Table 17.3 Italian (Chamber) and European parliamentary elections
(2013–2018, main parties) 363
Table 19.1 Referendums in Turkey (1961–2017) 406
Table 19.2 Swing voters: changing voting trends in the ‘Yes’ votes
between the 2010 and 2017 referendums in selected cases 414
Table 19.3 Differences between Yes and No Votes in 2007, 2010
and 2017 Referendums 416
Table 19.4 Predicting Yes Votes and No Votes in 2017—Linear (OLS)
Regression (Provincial Level) 419
xxi
xxii LIST OF TABLES
Table 24.1 Yes votes and turnout in accession referendums 515

Table 25.1 EU referendums held in Denmark 538
Table 25.2 Voter approval of EU integration in different issue areas
(1992 and 1993) 545
Table 25.3 Yes vote by current party preference, 1992 and 1993 546
Table 25.4 Number of stories in the main newspapers 548
Table 25.5 Predicting the No vote in the 2015 JHA referendum 549
Table 26.1 Results in Swedish national referendums 1922–2003 555
Table 26.2 The proportion of party sympathisers who voted on their
own party’s sponsored alternative in Swedish referendums 561
Table 27.1 A tale of two referendums 579
Table 32.1 Nationwide referendums in The Netherlands (%) 675
Table 32.2 Parliamentary support for ratification of the Association
Agreement before and after the 2016 referendum 688
Table 32.3 Parliamentary support for nationwide referendums in The
Netherlands 690
Table 33.1 Danish referendums on Europe 696
Table 33.2 Reported time of vote decision 705
Table 33.3 Party vote in most recent national election and referendum
vote 706
Table 33.4 Views on EU membership and referendum vote 707
Table 33.5 EU attitudes and referendum vote 708
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Julie Smith
1.1 Opening Remarks: A Case in Point

Referendums play an increasingly significant role in European politics at both
national and European Union (EU) level. Whether it is joining the EU,
amending the EU treaties or even leaving the EU, citizens have repeatedly
been invited to give their views on European matters in a significant shift from
representative democracy towards direct democracy. On other constitutional
and social issues, as well as matters of foreign policy and ratification of interna-
tional treaties, referendums have come to the fore in recent years, both within
EU Member States and would-be Member States, and in non-EU European
states, most notably Switzerland. The 2016 UK referendum on whether to stay
in the EU in particular raised profound questions, both practical and theoret-
ical, about the nature of direct democracy in the twenty-first century and its
relationship with representative democracy.
Referendums and plebiscites may allow citizens to respond to a very specific
question which raises few wider concerns for the polity as a whole, for example
on prohibition (or abolition) of a particular act of the state or of civil society,
or they may take place on a broader canvas where the decisions of voters
(the ‘people’) directly answering one question potentially affects the polity
overall and may pit citizens against their chosen representatives. Such tensions
can occur whether the referendum has been demanded by the citizens (often
J. Smith (B)
Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge,
Cambridge, UK
e-mail: jes42@cam.ac.uk
© The Author(s) 2021 1

J. Smith (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of European Referendums,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55803-1_1
2 J. SMITH
known as a ‘citizens’ initiative’), offered by the government (sometimes called

a ‘plebiscite’, depending on the specific context) or has been required by the
national constitution. Moreover, such tensions can be exacerbated if there is
perceived ambiguity in the question put or about implementing the outcome
of the vote and its implications.
In the case of a mandatory poll with binding consequences, the legal frame-
work needs to be clear and implementing its outcomes should generally be
uncontroversial. Provision for such a vote is enshrined in the constitution of
the polity and the government is expected to implement the express will of
the people; failure to do so would have consequences. In the case of optional,
advisory referendums, the relationship between the electorate’s express wishes
and the actions of their elected representatives is far less clear. Legally, neither
elected representatives nor the executive are bound to obey ‘the will of the
people’ and opponents of the outcome may argue that there is no reason to
implement a decision that has no more status than an opinion poll. Yet failure
to do so may cause a public backlash and possibly even legal action.
Such differences of interpretation were highlighted in the wake of the UK’s
2016 decision to leave the European Union. Prime Minister Theresa May
and her government claimed that they were obeying ‘an instruction’ from
the voters, a somewhat odd concept in a parliamentary democracy which
prides itself on the strength of parliamentary sovereignty. Four years on, senior
cabinet minister Michael Gove was using the same language as the UK moved
towards a new relationship with the EU, stating: ‘And it was the instruction
from the electorate in the 2016 referendum…’ (Gove 2020). It appeared that
the tools of direct democracy had trumped the instruments of representative
democracy. An optional, non-binding vote had created a critical juncture in
British politics and apparently constrained the choices of elected represen-
tatives. The executive considered itself bound by the referendum and when
MPs refused to accept the deal on departure that the PM had painstakingly
negotiated with the other 27 EU Member States she spoke directly to the
people. In a non-too-veiled attack on fellow MPs, May used an impromptu
television broadcast to set the people against Parliament. Her approach elicited
concern and condemnation among those who felt this might herald plebisci-
tary or dictatorial tendencies. True, the people had spoken. Yet when invited
to endorse their referendum vote by increasing the government’s majority at
a snap election in June 2017, they failed to do so. May lost the slim majority
her predecessor had secured just two years earlier and in the context of a hung
Parliament she found it impossible to secure a majority for any sort of Brexit
deal. For May this showed that Parliament was not listening to the people.
For those who believed in the traditional concept of Burkean representation,
there was a sense of disbelief—parliamentarians as representatives of the people
should use their judgement in determining how best to respond to the vote
to leave the EU they believed, not obey any ‘instruction’.
The interplay of direct and indirect democracy was toxic and the situation
was compounded by the fact that, unlike a question on, say, prohibition or
1 INTRODUCTION 3
fox-hunting on which an unambiguous, narrowly defined and reversible binary

choice can be made, the question put to the British electorate in 2016 was one
that was open to many interpretations. As is usually the case in referendums,
the Brexit vote was framed as a binary choice: Remain/Leave.1 However, in
practice ‘Leave’ can be seen as a catch-all to cover any one of several possible
scenarios for the UK’s relationship with the EU. The choice was superficially
very clear; in reality, it was anything but. Hence, in part, the difficulty the
Prime Minister faced in implementing the decision. This was compounded by
a further issue: the closeness of the vote. 52:48 sounds decisive. More than a
million votes separated the two sides in a poll where a majority of one would
have been sufficient to secure victory. Nonetheless, the majoritarian nature
of direct democracy discussed by Lord in Chapter 2 ensured that the seem-
ingly decisive outcome would be contested by those on the losing side. The
problem was exacerbated by the fact that turnout, although high in UK terms,
was only 72%. Fewer than half of eligible voters had backed the decision to
leave. In addition, over three million EU nationals were resident in the UK
at the time of the referendum, most of whom were not eligible to vote, while
hundreds of thousands of British citizens resident elsewhere in the EU were
also disenfranchised. Downplayed at the time of the referendum, the fact that
millions of people’s lives would be affected by a referendum in which they
could play no part raises serious questions about the extent of the franchise in
referendums.
There was a considerable backlash and attempts to overturn the results
of the referendum. The pro-EU Liberal Democrats fought a very successful
campaign in the 2019 European Parliament elections with the slogan ‘Stop
Brexit’. In the event, a further general election resolved the matter. The
Conservatives, now led by Leave-supporter Boris Johnson, won a resounding
victory in December 2019 and on 31 January 2020 the UK formally left the
European Union. The outcome of the June 2016 referendum had finally been
implemented but only after years of post-poll debate during which the argu-
ments and deliberation that should have preceded the vote took place. Because
the nature of the key aspect of ‘Brexit’, the UK’s relationship with the Euro-
pean Union once it left was never fully elaborated during the referendum,
much time was devoted to exploring the implications after people had voted.
In many ways, these difficulties reflect a key problem of all referendums:
their majoritarian nature. That Brexit became so contested and its outcome so
bitterly resented resulted from the majoritarian nature of referendums. Inde-
pendence referendums, discussed by Qvortrup and Curtice in Chapters 14
and 15 are also marked by a ‘winner takes all’ aspect that inevitably leaves
a section of the population on the losing side, forced to accept a decision
they opposed and which, potentially, they will have no opportunity to reverse.
Unlike electing a government when people know they will have a chance to
1 Sweden is an exception, offering multiple options in referendums (see Chapter 7 by

Qvortrup).
4 J. SMITH
kick out the incumbents after a few years if they believe they are not doing a
good job, a referendum decision is typically assumed to be a one-off decision,
not one to be repeated on a regular basis. Since many referendums relate to
constitutional issues, this is understandable: the very concept of a constitution
implies a degree of stability and continuity that may not be provided by ordi-
nary legislation and frequent amendment is undesirable. Thus, the results of
referendums should be durable; however, this also means that it is essential
that voters do make the right decision based on deliberation and information.
The 2016 referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union
serves as a perfect microcosm of the problems caused by grafting tools of
direct democracy onto a representative system and exemplifies the questions
that underpin the present volume. But first a word about definitions.
1.2 Referendums, Plebiscites or Citizens’ Initiatives

The terms ‘plebiscite’ and ‘referendum’ are frequently used interchangeably
to imply a form of direct democracy, where citizens rather than parliaments
decide on policy. A more accurate reading of the terms sees plebiscites as a
form of ‘caesarism’, as practised by Napoleon in the eighteenth century (see
Chapter 7 by Qvortrup) and typically seen in autocracies rather than democra-
cies. Referendums are more usually held in democracies and provide a greater
opportunity for citizens to say ‘No’. Just as democracy during the Soviet era
was frequently dubbed ‘façade democracy’, so plebiscites offer only a pretence
of citizens taking decisions. By contrast to referendums and plebiscites, citi-
zens’ initiatives provide bottom-up opportunities for citizens to set the agenda.
We use the term ‘referendums’ rather than ‘referenda’ in line with the prac-
tice established by Butler and Ranney in 1994 and, according to the Former
Speaker of the House of Commons, Betty Boothroyd, a term used in Britain
for over 150 years and quite appropriate for Parliament, which indeed uses
that term (Hansard 3 June 1998).
Who calls referendums and why is crucial to understanding their nature
and ramifications. Are they democratic devices enabling the people to exercise
sovereignty or the tools of dictators? Or are they in fact neutral mechanisms,
without inherent strengths and weaknesses? To an extent the answer lies in
the above-mentioned distinctions between referendums (typically called by
governments, or constitutionally mandated, in a democracy), plebiscites (called
by autocratic leaders and in which citizens have no meaningful choice), and
citizens’ initiatives (bottom-up devices where citizens themselves demand a say
on an issue, and which can by definition only occur in democratic systems).
In many cases, politicians call referendums to try to resolve differences within
their own party (see for example Chapter 26 by Oscarsson). This can be a
sensible way of addressing a matter that cuts across social and political cleav-
ages and thus cannot be determined through the existing party system. Yet,
the decision to call a referendum may, as critics have long claimed, essentially
serve as a device of (would-be) demagogues and dictators. Certainly, the 2017
1 INTRODUCTION 5
referendum in Turkey was intended to grant greater powers to the President,

while the 2015 referendum in Greece was used by the government as a way
to try to exert leverage externally—on the EU. By contrast, in Switzerland
optional votes are often pushed by citizens rather than political leaders, as
Chapter 10 by Serdült demonstrates. Elsewhere, referendums may be pushed
by opposition parties, especially at times of economic difficulty—context can
be everything.
1.3 Aims of This Volume

This volume seeks to address a range of perennial theoretical and legal ques-
tions that face policy-makers when they offer citizens the chance to take or
influence decisions by referendum, not least whether to accept the ‘will of the
people’. It does so via a series of chapters each of which provides an empiri-
cally rich analysis of one or more case studies. Despite the recent growth in the
study of referendums, there is no comprehensive work that looks at both the
empirical and theoretical aspects of referendums in Europe. There are a small
number of works focusing closely on matters of European integration as well
as seminal works on referendums around the world, including a recent edited
volume by Richard Rose, How Referendums Challenge European Democracy:
Brexit and Beyond (2020), in addition to myriad individual book and articles
about specific referendums. The two main volumes on referendums related to
European integration—Sara B. Hobolt’s Europe in Question: Referendums on
European Integration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) and Fernando
Mendez, Mario Mendez and Vasiliki Trigas’s (2014) Referendums and the
European Union: A comparative inquiry—are both limited to EU-related
matters and the former is now somewhat dated. While other volumes, notably
David Butler and Austin Ranney’s edited volume, Referendums Around the
World: The Growing Use of Direct Democracy (Washington DC: The AEI Press,
1994) and Matt Qvortrup’s Referendums Around the World: The Continued
Growth of Direct Democracy (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014), provide a wide,
comparative perspective, by definition they do not focus in detail on European
referendums and, inevitably, they do not cover a range of recent referen-
dums that have raised crucial constitutional questions. Morel and Qvortrup’s
comprehensive 2018 volume, the Routledge Handbook on Referendums and
Direct Democracy, looks at all aspects of direct democracy, not just referen-
dums, addressing not only national but also sub-national practices of direct
democracy globally. The present volume complements their work, by focusing
more narrowly on referendums within Europe, looking at domestic referen-
dums on constitutional matters and questions of social policy, as well as those
centred on EU-related matters.
We are not seeking to cover every referendum held in Europe since 1945—
this volume is a Handbook, not an Encyclopaedia, far less Wikipedia. Rather,
6 J. SMITH
through rigorous empirical analysis, it seeks to address a range of theoret-

ical and empirical questions across a number of European countries where
referendums have played a significant role. The empirical chapters focus only
on democracies, so that the tools of direct democracy under discussion are
referendums, rather than plebiscites, a distinction discussed at some length by
both Qvortrup and Uleri (Chapters 7 and 17, respectively). Thus, it does not
include the referendum that led to Crimea joining the Russian Federation in
2014, nor yet the so-called referendum called by Vladimir Putin on 1 July
2020 through which he de facto secured the right to the Russian presidency
for life in a vote where the outcome was known even before the polls closed.
The usual democratic norms were clearly lacking in both cases, rendering them
interesting in their own right but qualitatively different exercises from those
explored here.
Nonetheless, as the chapters by Batory, Morel, and Kalaycıoğlu and
Kocapınar (Chapters 31, 9 and 19, respectively) all demonstrate, plebiscitary
tendencies can appear in the use of referendums even in formally democratic
systems. Indeed, they can be used by leaders to try to reinforce their own posi-
tion, whether within the domestic polity as President Erdogan sought to do in
the 2017 referendum (Kalaycıoğlu and Kocapınar), or vis-à-vis third parties,
notably the European Union, pace Viktor Orbán and Alexis Tsipras opposing
the EU’s responses the refugee and Eurozone crises, respectively. Yet, as Chap-
ters 30 and 31 by Papadopoulou and Batory show, both premiers lost—Orbán
because so few Hungarian voters turned out and Tsipras because his snap refer-
endum and the popular vote resulted in a proposal from the EU that was
significantly worse than the offer that was previously available. Such outcomes
inevitably lead one to wonder why governments hold referendums when they
are not legally obliged to do so. As several chapters demonstrate, the answer
often lies in intra-party divisions, particularly within governing parties (see
Chapters 21, 22 and 26 by Fossum and Rosén, Smith and Oscarsson).
The regional focus on Europe allows authors to go into significant depth,
while the systematic framework deployed in Parts II and III means that the
authors address the same topics in a broadly similar way. Contributors were
not asked to follow a particular theoretical framework, which would have been
almost impossible with forty different authors involved. Unlike Morel and
Qvortrup (2018: 6), however, we aspire to go beyond being ‘a book about
questions, not answers’. All contributors to Parts II and III were asked to
reflect on a number of quite specific questions, allowing for common themes
to emerge, whether relating to the rules in place for referendums, the way
key actors—politicians, journalists or NGOs—campaign, and how far context,
political and economic, can impact on the outcomes of referendums.
Thus the democratic quality of referendums, the extent of the franchise, the
role of campaigns, the involvement of the media, the importance of financing
and, especially, the rules of the game are all explored in specific national
contexts. In some cases, the referendums in one country are assessed in more
than one chapter and in more than one part. This is true for Ireland, Denmark,
1 INTRODUCTION 7
the UK and Switzerland, where the frequency of direct democratic engage-

ment and/or the significance of particular issues under consideration, such as
abortion or equal marriage, devolution or possible secession, or the blocking
of EU treaty reform merit detailed analysis from various perspectives. In addi-
tion to the impact these referendums have had domestically, many have also
affected other countries and/or the EU as a whole and so have wider signif-
icance. For example, the Irish vote to legalise abortion fed into the debate
over the issue of legalisation in Northern Ireland, a constituent part of the UK,
while the fact that Ireland held a referendum on the Maastricht Treaty in 1992
led to demands for the UK to be permitted to hold a referendum on an EU
matter—the start of a long road to the 2016 membership referendum and the
UK’s eventual departure in 2020 (see Chapter 3 by Glencross). Contributors
also consider the impact of referendums on national policies and politics and,
where appropriate, their wider effects. This particularly applies to EU-related
referendums where there may be knock-on effects for other Member States
or would-be Member States, leading to a potential for domino effects and
domino strategies, for example in EU enlargement (see Chapters 21, 23 and
24 by Fossum and Rosén, Rye, and Mendez and Mendez) or treaty ratification
(see Chapter 28 by Sternberg).
1.4 Outline of the Handbook

Part I puts the theme of referendums into theoretical, historical and legal
perspective. In Chapter 2, Christopher Lord considers referendums in the light
of democratic theory. Andrew Glencross and Matt Qvortrup (Chapters 3 and
7) put European referendums in historical perspective. Glencross sees referen-
dums in part as a search for solutions to policy, driven by the promise that they
can bring a certain kind of closure not available via representative government,
albeit one that can also lead to crisis. Qvortrup’s synoptic analysis puts refer-
endums into their longer-term perspective looking to their Napoleonic roots
and how the practice spread and evolved. In Chapter 4, Alan Renwick and Jess
Sargeant focus on the more technical issues of the rules established for refer-
endums, highlighting the best practice proposed by the Venice Commission
and indicating the issues policy-makers need to consider when preparing to
hold a referendum, notably the ‘principles of universal, equal, free, and secret
suffrage’. In his chapter, Philip Norton considers the role of parliaments in
shaping referendums, including the decision to hold referendums, a thorny
question in light of the tension between representative and direct democracy.
Meanwhile, in Chapter 6 Ece Özlem Atikcan looks at public opinion and how
and why it changes during referendum campaigns, considering the significance
of campaigns and the arguments deployed.
The rules and practices of referendums in different polities may differ in a
variety of ways. For example, is the referendum mandatory or optional? Will
the outcome be binding on the executive or only advisory? Is the question on
the ballot paper binary or are voters offered a more complex set of choices?
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their own strength; that women are strong by sentiment; that the
same mental height which their husbands attain by toil, they attain by
sympathy with their husbands. Man is the will, and Woman the
sentiment. In this ship of humanity, Will is the rudder, and Sentiment
the sail: when Woman affects to steer, the rudder is only a masked
sail. When women engage in any art or trade, it is usually as a
resource, not as a primary object. The life of the affections is primary
to them, so that there is usually no employment or career which they
will not with their own applause and that of society quit for a suitable
marriage. And they give entirely to their affections, set their whole
fortune on the die, lose themselves eagerly in the glory of their
husbands and children. Man stands astonished at a magnanimity he
cannot pretend to. Mrs. Lucy Hutchinson, one of the heroines of the
English Commonwealth, who wrote the life of her husband, the
Governor of Nottingham, says, “If he esteemed her at a higher rate
than she in herself could have deserved, he was the author of that
virtue he doted on, while she only reflected his own glories upon him.
All that she was, was him, while he was hers, and all that she is now,
at best, but his pale shade.” As for Plato’s opinion, it is true that, up
to recent times, in no art or science, nor in painting, poetry or music,
have they produced a masterpiece. Till the new education and larger
opportunities of very modern times, this position, with the fewest
possible exceptions, has always been true. Sappho, to be sure, in
the Olympic Games, gained the crown over Pindar. But, in general,
no mastery in either of the fine arts—which should, one would say,
be the arts of women—has yet been obtained by them, equal to the
mastery of men in the same. The part they play in education, in the
care of the young and the tuition of older children, is their organic
office in the world. So much sympathy as they have makes them
inestimable as the mediators between those who have knowledge
and those who want it: besides, their fine organization, their taste
and love of details, makes the knowledge they give better in their
hands.
But there is an art which is better than painting, poetry, music, or
architecture,—better than botany, geology, or any science; namely,
Conversation. Wise, cultivated, genial conversation is the last flower
of civilization and the best result which life has to offer us,—a cup for
gods, which has no repentance. Conversation is our account of
ourselves. All we have, all we can, all we know, is brought into play,
and as the reproduction, in finer form, of all our havings.
Women are, by this and their social influence, the civilizers of
mankind. What is civilization? I answer, the power of good women. It
was Burns’s remark when he first came to Edinburgh that between
the men of rustic life and the polite world he observed little
difference; that in the former, though unpolished by fashion and
unenlightened by science, he had found much observation and much
intelligence; but a refined and accomplished woman was a being
almost new to him, and of which he had formed a very inadequate
idea. “I like women,” said a clear-headed man of the world; “they are
so finished.” They finish society, manners, language. Form and
ceremony are their realm. They embellish trifles. All these
ceremonies that hedge our life around are not to be despised, and
when we have become habituated to them, cannot be dispensed
with. No woman can despise them with impunity. Their genius
delights in ceremonies, in forms, in decorating life with manners, with
properties, order and grace. They are, in their nature, more relative;
the circumstance must always be fit; out of place they lose half their
weight, out of place they are disfranchised. Position, Wren said, is
essential to the perfecting of beauty;—a fine building is lost in a dark
lane; a statue should stand in the air; much more true is it of woman.
We commonly say that easy circumstances seem somehow
necessary to the finish of the female character: but then it is to be
remembered that they create these with all their might. They are
always making that civilization which they require; that state of art, of
decoration, that ornamental life in which they best appear.
The spiritual force of man is as much shown in taste, in his fancy
and imagination,—attaching deep meanings to things and to
arbitrary inventions of no real value,—as in his perception of truth.
He is as much raised above the beast by this creative faculty as by
any other. The horse and ox use no delays; they run to the river
when thirsty, to the corn when hungry, and say no thanks, but fight
down whatever opposes their appetite. But man invents and adorns
all he does with delays and degrees, paints it all over with forms, to
please himself better; he invented majesty and the etiquette of courts
and drawing-rooms; architecture, curtains, dress, all luxuries and
adornments, and the elegance of privacy, to increase the joys of
society. He invented marriage; and surrounded by religion, by
comeliness, by all manner of dignities and renunciations, the union
of the sexes.
And how should we better measure the gulf between the best
intercourse of men in old Athens, in London, or in our American
capitals,—between this and the hedgehog existence of diggers of
worms, and the eaters of clay and offal,—than by signalizing just this
department of taste or comeliness? Herein woman is the prime
genius and ordainer. There is no grace that is taught by the dancing-
master, no style adopted into the etiquette of courts, but was first the
whim and the mere action of some brilliant woman, who charmed
beholders by this new expression, and made it remembered and
copied. And I think they should magnify their ritual of manners.[202]
Society, conversation, decorum, flowers, dances, colors, forms, are
their homes and attendants. They should be found in fit surroundings
—with fair approaches, with agreeable architecture, and with all
advantages which the means of man collect:
“The far-fetched diamond finds its home

Flashing and smouldering in her hair.
For her the seas their pearls reveal,
Art and strange lands her pomp supply
With purple, chrome and cochineal,
Ochre and lapis lazuli.
The worm its golden woof presents.
Whatever runs, flies, dives or delves
All doff for her their ornaments,
Which suit her better than themselves.”[203]
There is no gift of Nature without some drawback. So, to women,

this exquisite structure could not exist without its own penalty. More
vulnerable, more infirm, more mortal than men, they could not be
such excellent artists in this element of fancy if they did not lend and
give themselves to it. They are poets who believe their own poetry.
They emit from their pores a colored atmosphere, one would say,
wave upon wave of rosy light, in which they walk evermore, and see
all objects through this warm-tinted mist that envelops them.
But the starry crown of woman is in the power of her affection and
sentiment, and the infinite enlargements to which they lead. Beautiful
is the passion of love, painter and adorner of youth and early life: but
who suspects, in its blushes and tremors, what tragedies, heroisms
and immortalities are beyond it? The passion, with all its grace and
poetry, is profane to that which follows it. All these affections are only
introductory to that which is beyond, and to that which is sublime.
We men have no right to say it, but the omnipotence of Eve is in
humility. The instincts of mankind have drawn the Virgin Mother—
“Created beings all in lowliness

Surpassing, as in height above them all.”[204]
This is the Divine Person whom Dante and Milton saw in vision.
This is the victory of Griselda, her supreme humility. And it is when
love has reached this height that all our pretty rhetoric begins to
have meaning. When we see that, it adds to the soul a new soul, it is
honey in the mouth, music in the ear and balsam in the heart.
“Far have I clambered in my mind,

But nought so great as Love I find.
What is thy tent, where dost thou dwell?
‘My mansion is humility,
Heaven’s vastest capability.’
The further it doth downward tend,
The higher up it doth ascend.”[205]
The first thing men think of, when they love, is to exhibit their
usefulness and advantages to the object of their affection. Women
make light of these, asking only love. They wish it to be an exchange
of nobleness.
There is much in their nature, much in their social position which
gives them a certain power of divination. And women know, at first
sight, the characters of those with whom they converse. There is
much that tends to give them a religious height which men do not
attain. Their sequestration from affairs and from the injury to the
moral sense which affairs often inflict, aids this. And in every
remarkable religious development in the world, women have taken a
leading part. It is very curious that in the East, where Woman
occupies, nationally, a lower sphere, where the laws resist the
education and emancipation of women,—in the Mohammedan faith,
Woman yet occupies the same leading position, as a prophetess,
that she has among the ancient Greeks, or among the Hebrews, or
among the Saxons. This power, this religious character, is
everywhere to be remarked in them.[206]
The action of society is progressive. In barbarous society the
position of women is always low—in the Eastern nations lower than
in the West. “When a daughter is born,” says the Shiking, the old
Sacred Book of China, “she sleeps on the ground, she is clothed
with a wrapper, she plays with a tile; she is incapable of evil or of
good.” And something like that position, in all low society, is the
position of woman; because, as before remarked, she is herself its
civilizer. With the advancements of society, the position and
influence of woman bring her strength or her faults into light. In
modern times, three or four conspicuous instrumentalities may be
marked. After the deification of Woman in the Catholic Church, in the
sixteenth or seventeenth century,—when her religious nature gave
her, of course, new importance,—the Quakers have the honor of
having first established, in their discipline, the equality in the sexes. It
is even more perfect in the later sect of the Shakers, where no
business is broached or counselled without the intervention of one
elder and one elderess.
A second epoch for Woman was in France,—entirely civil; the
change of sentiment from a rude to a polite character, in the age of
Louis XIV.,—commonly dated from the building of the Hôtel de
Rambouillet.[207] I think another important step was made by the
doctrine of Swedenborg, a sublime genius who gave a scientific
exposition of the part played severally by man and woman in the
world, and showed the difference of sex to run through nature and
through thought. Of all Christian sects this is at this moment the most
vital and aggressive.
Another step was the effect of the action of the age in the
antagonism to Slavery. It was easy to enlist Woman in this; it was
impossible not to enlist her. But that Cause turned out to be a great
scholar. He was a terrible metaphysician. He was a jurist, a poet, a
divine. Was never a University of Oxford or Göttingen that made
such students. It took a man from the plough and made him acute,
eloquent, and wise, to the silencing of the doctors. There was
nothing it did not pry into, no right it did not explore, no wrong it did
not expose. And it has, among its other effects, given Woman a
feeling of public duty and an added self-respect.
One truth leads in another by the hand; one right is an accession
of strength to take more. And the times are marked by the new
attitude of Woman; urging, by argument and by association, her
rights of all kinds,—in short, to one half of the world;—as the right to
education, to avenues of employment, to equal rights of property, to
equal rights in marriage, to the exercise of the professions and of
suffrage.
Of course, this conspicuousness had its inconveniences. But it is
cheap wit that has been spent on this subject; from Aristophanes, in
whose comedies I confess my dulness to find good joke, to Rabelais,
in whom it is monstrous exaggeration of temperament, and not borne
out by anything in nature,—down to English Comedy, and, in our
day, to Tennyson,[208] and the American newspapers. In all, the body
of the joke is one, namely, to charge women with temperament; to
describe them as victims of temperament; and is identical with
Mahomet’s opinion that women have not a sufficient moral or
intellectual force to control the perturbations of their physical
structure. These were all drawings of morbid anatomy, and such
satire as might be written on the tenants of a hospital or on an
asylum for idiots. Of course it would be easy for women to retaliate in
kind, by painting men from the dogs and gorillas that have worn our
shape. That they have not, is an eulogy on their taste and self-
respect. The good easy world took the joke which it liked. There is
always the want of thought; there is always credulity. There are
plenty of people who believe women to be incapable of anything but
to cook, incapable of interest in affairs. There are plenty of people
who believe that the world is governed by men of dark complexions,
that affairs are only directed by such, and do not see the use of
contemplative men, or how ignoble would be the world that wanted
them. And so without the affection of women.
But for the general charge: no doubt it is well founded. They are
victims of the finer temperament. They have tears, and gayeties, and
faintings, and glooms and devotion to trifles. Nature’s end, of
maternity for twenty years, was of so supreme importance that it was
to be secured at all events, even to the sacrifice of the highest
beauty. They are more personal. Men taunt them that, whatever they
do, say, read or write, they are thinking of themselves and their set.
Men are not to the same degree temperamented, for there are
multitudes of men who live to objects quite out of them, as to politics,
to trade, to letters or an art, unhindered by any influence of
constitution.
The answer that lies, silent or spoken, in the minds of well-
meaning persons, to the new claims, is this: that though their
mathematical justice is not to be denied, yet the best women do not
wish these things; they are asked for by people who intellectually
seek them, but who have not the support or sympathy of the truest
women; and that, if the laws and customs were modified in the
manner proposed, it would embarrass and pain gentle and lovely
persons with duties which they would find irksome and distasteful.
Very likely. Providence is always surprising us with new and unlikely
instruments. But perhaps it is because these people have been
deprived of education, fine companions, opportunities, such as they
wished,—because they feel the same rudeness and disadvantage
which offends you,—that they have been stung to say, ‘It is too late
for us to be polished and fashioned into beauty, but, at least, we will
see that the whole race of women shall not suffer as we have
suffered.’
They have an unquestionable right to their own property. And if a
woman demand votes, offices and political equality with men, as
among the Shakers an Elder and Elderess are of equal power,—and
among the Quakers,—it must not be refused. It is very cheap wit that
finds it so droll that a woman should vote. Educate and refine society
to the highest point,—bring together a cultivated society of both
sexes, in a drawing-room, and consult and decide by voices on a
question of taste or on a question of right, and is there any absurdity
or any practical difficulty in obtaining their authentic opinions? If not,
then there need be none in a hundred companies, if you educate
them and accustom them to judge. And, for the effect of it, I can say,
for one, that all my points would sooner be carried in the State if
women voted. On the questions that are important,—whether the
government shall be in one person, or whether representative, or
whether democratic; whether men shall be holden in bondage, or
shall be roasted alive and eaten, as in Typee, or shall be hunted with
bloodhounds, as in this country; whether men shall be hanged for
stealing, or hanged at all; whether the unlimited sale of cheap liquors
shall be allowed;—they would give, I suppose, as intelligent a vote
as the voters of Boston or New York.
We may ask, to be sure,—Why need you vote? If new power is
here, of a character which solves old tough questions, which puts me
and all the rest in the wrong, tries and condemns our religion,
customs, laws, and opens new careers to our young receptive men
and women, you can well leave voting to the old dead people. Those
whom you teach, and those whom you half teach, will fast enough
make themselves considered and strong with their new insight, and
votes will follow from all the dull.
The objection to their voting is the same as is urged, in the lobbies
of legislatures, against clergymen who take an active part in politics;
—that if they are good clergymen they are unacquainted with the
expediencies of politics, and if they become good politicians they are
worse clergymen. So of women, that they cannot enter this arena
without being contaminated and unsexed.
Here are two or three objections: first, a want of practical wisdom;
second, a too purely ideal view; and, third, danger of contamination.
For their want of intimate knowledge of affairs, I do not think this
ought to disqualify them from voting at any town-meeting which I
ever attended. I could heartily wish the objection were sound. But if
any man will take the trouble to see how our people vote,—how
many gentlemen are willing to take on themselves the trouble of
thinking and determining for you, and, standing at the door of the
polls, give every innocent citizen his ticket as he comes in, informing
him that this is the vote of his party; and how the innocent citizen,
without further demur, goes and drops it in the ballot-box,—I cannot
but think he will agree that most women might vote as wisely.
For the other point, of their not knowing the world, and aiming at
abstract right without allowance for circumstances,—that is not a
disqualification, but a qualification. Human society is made up of
partialities. Each citizen has an interest and a view of his own, which,
if followed out to the extreme, would leave no room for any other
citizen. One man is timid and another rash; one would change
nothing, and the other is pleased with nothing; one wishes schools,
another armies, one gunboats, another public gardens. Bring all
these biases together and something is done in favor of them all.
Every one is a half vote, but the next elector behind him brings the
other or corresponding half in his hand: a reasonable result is had.
Now there is no lack, I am sure, of the expediency, or of the interests
of trade or of imperative class interests being neglected. There is no
lack of votes representing the physical wants; and if in your city the
uneducated emigrant vote numbers thousands, representing a brutal
ignorance and mere animal wants, it is to be corrected by an
educated and religious vote, representing the wants and desires of
honest and refined persons. If the wants, the passions, the vices, are
allowed a full vote through the hands of a half-brutal intemperate
population, I think it but fair that the virtues, the aspirations should be
allowed a full vote, as an offset, through the purest part of the
people.
As for the unsexing and contamination,—that only accuses our
existing politics, shows how barbarous we are,—that our policies are
so crooked, made up of things not to be spoken, to be understood
only by wink and nudge; this man to be coaxed, that man to be
bought, and that other to be duped. It is easy to see that there is
contamination enough, but it rots the men now, and fills the air with
stench. Come out of that: it is like a dance-cellar. The fairest names
in this country in literature, in law, have gone into Congress and
come out dishonored. And when I read the list of men of intellect, of
refined pursuits, giants in law, or eminent scholars, or of social
distinction, leading men of wealth and enterprise in the commercial
community, and see what they have voted for and suffered to be
voted for, I think no community was ever so politely and elegantly
betrayed.
I do not think it yet appears that women wish this equal share in
public affairs. But it is they and not we that are to determine it. Let
the laws be purged of every barbarous remainder, every barbarous
impediment to women. Let the public donations for education be
equally shared by them, let them enter a school as freely as a
church, let them have and hold and give their property as men do
theirs;—and in a few years it will easily appear whether they wish a
voice in making the laws that are to govern them. If you do refuse
them a vote, you will also refuse to tax them,—according to our
Teutonic principle, No representation, no tax.
All events of history are to be regarded as growths and offshoots
of the expanding mind of the race, and this appearance of new
opinions, their currency and force in many minds, is itself the
wonderful fact. For whatever is popular is important, shows the
spontaneous sense of the hour. The aspiration of this century will be
the code of the next. It holds of high and distant causes, of the same
influences that make the sun and moon. When new opinions appear,
they will be entertained and respected, by every fair mind, according
to their reasonableness, and not according to their convenience, or
their fitness to shock our customs. But let us deal with them greatly;
let them make their way by the upper road, and not by the way of
manufacturing public opinion, which lapses continually into
expediency, and makes charlatans. All that is spontaneous is
irresistible, and forever it is individual force that interests. I need not
repeat to you—your own solitude will suggest it—that a masculine
woman is not strong, but a lady is. The loneliest thought, the purest
prayer, is rushing to be the history of a thousand years.
Let us have the true woman, the adorner, the hospitable, the
religious heart, and no lawyer need be called in to write stipulations,
the cunning clauses of provision, the strong investitures;—for woman
moulds the lawgiver and writes the law. But I ought to say, I think it
impossible to separate the interests and education of the sexes.
Improve and refine the men, and you do the same by the women,
whether you will or no. Every woman being the wife or the daughter
of a man,—wife, daughter, sister, mother, of a man, she can never
be very far from his ear, never not of his counsel, if she has really
something to urge that is good in itself and agreeable to nature.
Slavery it is that makes slavery; freedom, freedom. The slavery of
women happened when the men were slaves of kings. The
melioration of manners brought their melioration of course. It could
not be otherwise, and hence the new desire of better laws. For there
are always a certain number of passionately loving fathers, brothers,
husbands and sons who put their might into the endeavor to make a
daughter, a wife, or a mother happy in the way that suits best.
Woman should find in man her guardian. Silently she looks for that,
and when she finds that he is not, as she instantly does, she betakes
her to her own defences, and does the best she can. But when he is
her guardian, fulfilled with all nobleness, knows and accepts his
duties as her brother, all goes well for both.
The new movement is only a tide shared by the spirits of man and
woman; and you may proceed in the faith that whatever the woman’s
heart is prompted to desire, the man’s mind is simultaneously
prompted to accomplish.[209]
XXI
ADDRESS
TO THE INHABITANTS OF CONCORD AT THE

CONSECRATION OF SLEEPY HOLLOW
SEPTEMBER 29, 1855
SLEEPY HOLLOW
“No abbey’s gloom, nor dark cathedral stoops,

No winding torches paint the midnight air;
Here the green pines delight, the aspen droops
Along the modest pathways, and those fair
Pale asters of the season spread their plumes
Around this field, fit garden for our tombs.
And shalt thou pause to hear some funeral-bell

Slow stealing o’er the heart in this calm place,
Not with a throb of pain, a feverish knell,
But in its kind and supplicating grace,
It says, Go, pilgrim, on thy march, be more
Friend to the friendless than thou wast before;
Learn from the loved one’s rest serenity;

To-morrow that soft bell for thee shall sound,
And thou repose beneath the whispering tree,
One tribute more to this submissive ground;—
Prison thy soul from malice, bar out pride,
Nor these pale flowers nor this still field deride:
Rather to those ascents of being turn

Where a ne’er-setting sun illumes the year
Eternal, and the incessant watch-fires burn
Of unspent holiness and goodness clear,—
Forget man’s littleness, deserve the best,
God’s mercy in thy thought and life contest.”
William Ellery Channing.
ADDRESS
TO THE INHABITANTS OF CONCORD AT THE CONSECRATION OF SLEEPY
HOLLOW SEPTEMBER 29, 1855
Citizens and friends: The committee to whom was confided the

charge of carrying out the wishes of the town in opening the
cemetery, having proceeded so far as to enclose the ground, and cut
the necessary roads, and having laid off as many lots as are likely to
be wanted at present, have thought it fit to call the inhabitants
together, to show you the ground, now that the new avenues make
its advantages appear; and to put it at your disposition.
They have thought that the taking possession of this field ought to
be marked by a public meeting and religious rites: and they have
requested me to say a few words which the serious and tender
occasion inspires.
And this concourse of friendly company assures me that they have
rightly interpreted your wishes. [Here followed, in the address, about
three pages of matter which Mr. Emerson used later in his essay on
Immortality, which may be found in the volume Letters and Social
Aims, beginning on page 324, “The credence of men,” etc., and
ending on pages 326-27 with the sentence, “Meantime the true
disciples saw, through the letters, the doctrine of eternity which
dissolved the poor corpse and nature also, and gave grandeur to the
passing hour.”]
In these times we see the defects of our old theology; its inferiority
to our habit of thoughts. Men go up and down; Science is
popularized; the irresistible democracy—shall I call it?—of chemistry,
of vegetation, which recomposes for new life every decomposing
particle,—the race never dying, the individual never spared,—have
impressed on the mind of the age the futility of these old arts of
preserving. We give our earth to earth. We will not jealously guard a
few atoms under immense marbles, selfishly and impossibly
sequestering it from the vast circulations of Nature, but, at the same
time, fully admitting the divine hope and love which belong to our
nature, wishing to make one spot tender to our children, who shall
come hither in the next century to read the dates of these lives.
Our people accepting this lesson from science, yet touched by the
tenderness which Christianity breathes, have found a mean in the
consecration of gardens. A simultaneous movement has, in a
hundred cities and towns in this country, selected some convenient
piece of undulating ground with pleasant woods and waters; every
family chooses its own clump of trees; and we lay the corpse in
these leafy colonnades.
A grove of trees,—what benefit or ornament is so fair and great?
they make the landscape; they keep the earth habitable; their roots
run down, like cattle, to the water-courses; their heads expand to
feed the atmosphere. The life of a tree is a hundred and a thousand
years; its decays ornamental; its repairs self-made: they grow when
we sleep, they grew when we were unborn. Man is a moth among
these longevities. He plants for the next millennium. Shadows haunt
them; all that ever lived about them cling to them. You can almost
see behind these pines the Indian with bow and arrow lurking yet
exploring the traces of the old trail.
Modern taste has shown that there is no ornament, no architecture
alone, so sumptuous as well disposed woods and waters, where art
has been employed only to remove superfluities, and bring out the
natural advantages. In cultivated grounds one sees the picturesque
and opulent effect of the familiar shrubs, barberry, lilac, privet and
thorns, when they are disposed in masses, and in large spaces.
What work of man will compare with the plantation of a park? It
dignifies life. It is a seat for friendship, counsel, taste and religion. I
do not wonder that they are the chosen badge and point of pride of
European nobility. But how much more are they needed by us,
anxious, overdriven Americans, to stanch and appease that fury of
temperament which our climate bestows!
This tract fortunately lies adjoining to the Agricultural Society’s
ground, to the New Burial Ground, to the Court House and the Town
House, making together a large block of public ground, permanent
property of the town and county,—all the ornaments of either adding
so much value to all.
I suppose all of us will readily admit the value of parks and
cultivated grounds to the pleasure and education of the people, but I
have heard it said here that we would gladly spend for a park for the
living, but not for a cemetery; a garden for the living, a home of
thought and friendship. Certainly the living need it more than the
dead; indeed, to speak precisely, it is given to the dead for the
reaction of benefit on the living. But if the direct regard to the living
be thought expedient, that is also in your power. This ground is
happily so divided by Nature as to admit of this relation between the
Past and the Present. In the valley where we stand will be the
Monuments. On the other side of the ridge, towards the town, a
portion of the land is in full view of the cheer of the village and is out
of sight of the Monuments; it admits of being reserved for secular
purposes; for games,—not such as the Greeks honored the dead
with, but for games of education; the distribution of school prizes; the
meeting of teachers; patriotic eloquence, the utterance of the
principles of national liberty to private, social, literary or religious
fraternities. Here we may establish that most agreeable of all
museums, and agreeable to the temper of our times,—an
Arboretum,—wherein may be planted, by the taste of every citizen,
one tree, with its name recorded in a book; every tree that is native
to Massachusetts, or will grow in it; so that every child may be shown
growing, side by side, the eleven oaks of Massachusetts; and the
twenty willows; the beech, which we have allowed to die out of the
eastern counties; and here the vast firs of California and Oregon.
This spot for twenty years has borne the name of Sleepy Hollow.
Its seclusion from the village in its immediate neighborhood had
made it to all the inhabitants an easy retreat on a Sabbath day, or a
summer twilight, and it was inevitably chosen by them when the
design of a new cemetery was broached, if it did not suggest the
design, as the fit place for their final repose. In all the multitudes of
woodlands and hillsides, which within a few years have been laid out
with a similar design, I have not known one so fitly named. Sleepy
Hollow. In this quiet valley, as in the palm of Nature’s hand, we shall
sleep well when we have finished our day. What is the Earth itself
but a surface scooped into nooks and caves of slumber—according
to the Eastern fable, a bridge full of holes, into one or other of which
all the passengers sink to silence? Nay, when I think of the mystery
of life, its round of illusions, our ignorance of its beginning or its end,
the speed of the changes of that glittering dream we call existence,
—I think sometimes that the vault of the sky arching there upward,
under which our busy being is whirled, is only a Sleepy Hollow, with
path of Suns, instead of foot-paths; and Milky Ways, for truck-roads.
The ground has the peaceful character that belongs to this town;—
no lofty crags, no glittering cataracts;—but I hold that every part of
Nature is handsome when not deformed by bad Art. Bleak sea-rocks
and sea-downs and blasted heaths have their own beauty; and
though we make much ado in our praises of Italy or Andes, Nature
makes not so much difference. The morning, the moonlight, the
spring day, are magical painters, and can glorify a meadow or a rock.
But we must look forward also, and make ourselves a thousand
years old; and when these acorns, that are falling at our feet, are
oaks overshadowing our children in a remote century, this mute
green bank will be full of history: the good, the wise and great will
have left their names and virtues on the trees; heroes, poets,
beauties, sanctities, benefactors, will have made the air timeable and
articulate.
And hither shall repair, to this modest spot of God’s earth, every
sweet and friendly influence; the beautiful night and beautiful day will
come in turn to sit upon the grass. Our use will not displace the old
tenants. The well-beloved birds will not sing one song the less, the
high-holding woodpecker, the meadow-lark, the oriole, robin, purple
finch, bluebird, thrush and red-eyed warbler, the heron, the bittern
will find out the hospitality and protection from the gun of this asylum,
and will seek the waters of the meadow; and in the grass, and by the
pond, the locust, the cricket and the hyla, shall shrilly play.
We shall bring hither the body of the dead, but how shall we catch
the escaped soul? Here will burn for us, as the oath of God, the
sublime belief. I have heard that death takes us away from ill things,
not from good. I have heard that when we pronounce the name of
man, we pronounce the belief of immortality. All great natures delight
in stability; all great men find eternity affirmed in the promise of their
faculties. Why is the fable of the Wandering Jew agreeable to men,
but because they want more time and land to execute their thoughts
in? Life is not long enough for art, nor long enough for friendship.
The evidence from intellect is as valid as the evidence from love.
The being that can share a thought and feeling so sublime as
confidence in truth is no mushroom. Our dissatisfaction with any
other solution is the blazing evidence of immortality.
XXII
ROBERT BURNS
SPEECH DELIVERED AT THE CELEBRATION OF

THE BURNS CENTENARY, BOSTON JANUARY
25, 1859
“His was the music to whose tone

The common pulse of man keeps time
In cot or castle’s mirth or moan,
In cold or sunny clime.
Praise to the bard! his words are driven,

Like flower-seeds by the far winds sown,
Where’er, beneath the sky of heaven,
The birds of fame have flown.”
Halleck.
ROBERT BURNS
MR. PRESIDENT, and Gentlemen: I do not know by what
untoward accident it has chanced, and I forbear to inquire, that, in
this accomplished circle, it should fall to me, the worst Scotsman of
all, to receive your commands, and at the latest hour too, to respond
to the sentiment just offered, and which indeed makes the occasion.
But I am told there is no appeal, and I must trust to the inspirations of
the theme to make a fitness which does not otherwise exist. Yet, Sir,
I heartily feel the singular claims of the occasion. At the first
announcement, from I know not whence, that the 25th of January
was the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns, a
sudden consent warmed the great English race, in all its kingdoms,
colonies and states, all over the world, to keep the festival. We are
here to hold our parliament with love and poesy, as men were wont
to do in the Middle Ages. Those famous parliaments might or might
not have had more stateliness and better singers than we,—though
that is yet to be known,—but they could not have better reason. I can
only explain this singular unanimity in a race which rarely acts
together, but rather after their watch-word, Each for himself,—by the
fact that Robert Burns, the poet of the middle class, represents in the
mind of men to-day that great uprising of the middle class against
the armed and privileged minorities, that uprising which worked
politically in the American and French Revolutions, and which, not in
governments so much as in education and social order, has changed
the face of the world.
In order for this destiny, his birth, breeding and fortunes were low.
His organic sentiment was absolute independence, and resting as it
should on a life of labor. No man existed who could look down on
him. They that looked into his eyes saw that they might look down
the sky as easily.[210] His muse and teaching was common sense,
joyful, aggressive, irresistible. Not Latimer, nor Luther struck more
telling blows against false theology than did this brave singer. The
Confession of Augsburg, the Declaration of Independence, the
French Rights of Man, and the Marseillaise, are not more weighty
documents in the history of freedom than the songs of Burns. His
satire has lost none of its edge. His musical arrows yet sing through
the air. He is so substantially a reformer that I find his grand plain
sense in close chain with the greatest masters,—Rabelais,
Shakspeare in comedy, Cervantes, Butler, and Burns. If I should add
another name, I find it only in a living countryman of Burns.[211]
He is an exceptional genius. The people who care nothing for
literature and poetry care for Burns. It was indifferent—they thought
who saw him—whether he wrote verse or not: he could have done
anything else as well. Yet how true a poet is he! And the poet, too, of
poor men, of gray hodden and the guernsey coat and the blouse. He
has given voice to all the experiences of common life; he has
endeared the farmhouse and cottage, patches and poverty, beans
and barley; ale, the poor man’s wine; hardship; the fear of debt; the
dear society of weans and wife, of brothers and sisters, proud of
each other, knowing so few and finding amends for want and
obscurity in books and thoughts.[212] What a love of Nature, and,
shall I say it? of middle-class Nature. Not like Goethe, in the stars, or
like Byron, in the ocean, or Moore, in the luxurious East, but in the
homely landscape which the poor see around them,—bleak leagues
of pasture and stubble, ice and sleet and rain and snow-choked
brooks; birds, hares, field-mice, thistles and heather, which he daily
knew. How many “Bonny Doons” and “John Anderson my jo’s” and
“Auld lang synes” all around the earth have his verses been applied
to! And his love-songs still woo and melt the youths and maids; the
farm-work, the country holiday, the fishing-cobble are still his debtors
to-day.
And as he was thus the poet of the poor, anxious, cheerful,
working humanity, so had he the language of low life. He grew up in
a rural district, speaking a patois unintelligible to all but natives, and
he has made the Lowland Scotch a Doric dialect of fame. It is the
only example in history of a language made classic by the genius of
a single man. But more than this. He had that secret of genius to
draw from the bottom of society the strength of its speech, and
astonish the ears of the polite with these artless words, better than
art, and filtered of all offence through his beauty. It seemed odious to
Luther that the devil should have all the best tunes; he would bring
them into the churches; and Burns knew how to take from fairs and
gypsies, blacksmiths and drovers, the speech of the market and
street, and clothe it with melody. But I am detaining you too long.
The memory of Burns,—I am afraid heaven and earth have taken too
good care of it to leave us anything to say. The west winds are
murmuring it. Open the windows behind you, and hearken for the
incoming tide, what the waves say of it. The doves perching always
on the eaves of the Stone Chapel opposite, may know something
about it. Every name in broad Scotland keeps his fame bright. The

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The Palgrave Handbook Of European

Referendums Julie Smith

The Palgrave Handbook of European Banking 1st Edition

The Palgrave Handbook of European Banking Union Law

The Palgrave handbook of critical theory Thompson

The Palgrave Handbook of Leisure Theory Karl Spracklen

The Palgrave Handbook Of Workplace Innovation Adela

The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Surgery Thomas

Palgrave handbook of mass dictatorship Corner

The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic (Im)politeness

ISBN 978-3-030-55802-4 ISBN 978-3-030-55803-1 (eBook)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021

Cover image: Andi Edwards/Alamy Stock Photo

Somewhat counter-intuitively, this volume on direct democracy has its genesis

My greatest debt of gratitude, of course, is to all the contributors who have

Cambridge Julie Smith

Part I Referendums in Theory and in Practice

2 Referendums and Democratic Theory 29

4 The Rules of Referendums 67

5 Referendums and Parliaments 91

6 The Shifting Will of the People: The Case of EU

7 Two Hundred Years of Direct Democracy: The

Part II Domestic Referendums

8 The King Versus the People: Lessons from a Belgian

9 The Referendum Experience in France 179

10 The Referendum Experience in Switzerland 203

11 The Scottish and Welsh Devolution Referendums of 1979

12 The 1998 Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement Referendums

13 The United Kingdom Parliamentary Voting System

14 The Scottish Independence Referendum of 2014 287

15 The 2017 Catalan Referendum in Comparative Perspective 307

16 The Irish Referendums on Marriage Equality and Abortion 325

17 Referenda and Constitutional Change in Italy—The Failed

18 Luxembourg: The 2015 Referendum on Voting Rights

19 Turkey’s Constitutional Referendum: The 16 April 2017

Part III EU-Related Referendums

20 The Irish and Danish 1972 Referendums on EC Accession 429

21 Referendums: Norway 1972 and 1994 449

22 In or Out of ‘Europe’? The 1975 and 2016 UK

23 The EFTA Enlargement 495

24 EU Accession Referendums 513

25 ‘If You Can’t Join Them…’: Explaining No Votes

26 The 2003 Swedish Euro Referendum 553

27 Referendums on EU Treaty Reform: Revisiting the Result

28 The French and Dutch Block the Constitutional Treaty 583

29 Swiss Votes on Europe 601

30 The 2015 Greek Referendum on Bailouts 625

31 Hungary’s EU Refugee Relocation Quota Referendum:

32 The Dutch Referendum on the EU-Ukraine Association

33 Issue Voting in Danish EU Referendums 695

Alex Andrione-Moylan, Ph.D. Fellow at the Leuven Centre for Global

Johan A. Elkink University College Dublin, Ireland, specialises in quantita-

Ersin Kalaycıoğlu is a student of comparative politics at Sabancı University,

Fernando Mendez is a Senior Researcher based at the University of Zürich,

Matt Qvortrup is Professor of Political Science at Coventry University, UK.

Uwe Serdült is working as a professor at Ritsumeikan University, Japan, in

Fig. 6.1 Three patterns of opinion change in referendums 111

Fig. 19.3 Results of 21 October 2007 Constitutional Referendum