Ideas: Preferendums

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27.11.2009 // by Guest

This idea comes from Stephen Whitehead at the New Economics Foundation:

What's the big idea?:

Citizens should be given the right to use petitions to initiate ‘preferendums' which enable them to propose and vote on solutions to political questions.

The call for citizens to be given the right to petition to initiate referenda where they can vote directly on a policy issue is a familiar one. But it is also problematic. Referenda offer artificial yes / no choices which don't empower citizens to apply their knowledge and creativity to designing solutions for social problems. A ‘preferendum' expands on the idea of a referendum to give interested citizens more of an opportunity to get involved and chooses an outcome based on the
widest possible range of support.

The preferendum process begins when enough citizens (perhaps 1% of the electorate, whether local, regional or national) sign a petition calling for a referendum on a particular policy question. At this stage, citizens are invited to work together to come up with answers to the question. A group of stakeholders - representatives of people and organisations who are affected by the question - will sort through the expressed answers to identify the key themes and unique ideas and make them into a limited set of options. Citizens will then vote on these by listing their preferences - from their favourite to their least favourite. The option chosen will be the one which receives the broadest support - not the one which gets the most first preferences.

Why is this change important to you?:

If we want to build a meaningful democracy, we need to find a way to give citizens the power to force issues onto the government's agenda and compel it to act. But we also need to find ways to temper this by enabling citizens to achieve social change through negotiation and dialog, not by using the ballot box to over-ride the interests of vulnerable minorities.

Like a referendum, a preferendum enables citizens to control the political agenda. However, the drafting process ensures that the vital power to determine which options are on the ballot is exercised by citizens not the state. And by using preferential, consensus-based voting, it also creates a space where groups with differing interests have an incentive to identify common ground. Because consensus voting reward proposals which everyone can be content with, they encourage
broad-based coalitions rather than the mobilisation of narrow groups.