Perhaps the most alien element in Plato’s thought is not the undemocratic
constitution he advocates, but the way he sees the whole role of the state. To
Plato (and here Aristotle followed him) the purpose of the state is to enforce
decent living, actively to encourage a morality and religion, rather than to
satisfy the demands of the population or even just to keep law and order to
allow freedom. For this reason his philosophical arguments about the nature of
goodness and our capacity to perceive it are not so much dismissed, as simply
not seen as relevant when a modern thinker of almost any political persuasion
considers his constitutional arguments.
Plebiscitory Democracy
Plebiscites arereferendums, a system for allowing the whole of an electorate
directly to give their opinion on some political question. The most successful
and long-term experience is that of Switzerland, where a host of ordinary
policy questions are routinely put to the electorate, following a tradition dating
to the 16th century. They have been used in a variety of contexts in modern
politics. One quite common use has been to hold a plebiscite for the
population of a territory over which two countries have rival claims to
sovereignty. Alternatively referendums are used to discover public attitudes
to constitutional changes, as in the United Kingdom in 1975 (over retaining
membership of the European Communities—EC, now the European
Union, EU), and twice (in 1979 and 1997) in Wales and Scotland over
devolution. It is generally agreed still that the UK cannot undertake con-
stitutional reform without such action. Not only were referendums held to
legitimize Scottish and Welsh devolution, but the proposal to join the EU’s
common currency is thought to require a referendum. Some countries,
including Australia, Denmark and Ireland, require a referendum to be held
on any constitutional amendment; in the cases of the last two, this quite
frequently entails a referendum being held to endorse EU legislation. Many
issues of policy at local or state levels are frequently decided in this way in the
USA. The idea that a country might be governed extensively by the use of
plebiscites on ordinary policy issues is attractive to some, because it seems to be
a way of avoiding the disadvantages ofrepresentative democracywithout
the impracticalities ofdirect democracy.
To others, however, plebiscitory democracy has often seemed extremely
dangerous. A principal argument against extensive use of referendums is that
much depends on the specific framing of the question. The proportion of an
electorate supporting some proposal can be crucially dependent on exactly
what alternative they are offered on a ballot paper. An experiment carried out
in the UK in 1975 by a publicopinion poll, using a variety of questions about
staying in the EC on different samples, produced very widely varying propor-
Plebiscitory Democracy