{"id":2433,"date":"2019-02-27T13:27:46","date_gmt":"2019-02-27T13:27:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/?p=2433"},"modified":"2019-02-27T13:27:53","modified_gmt":"2019-02-27T13:27:53","slug":"a-second-brexit-referendum-the-myth-of-popular-sovereignty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/?p=2433","title":{"rendered":"A Second Brexit Referendum: The Myth of Popular Sovereignty"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Brexit is an issue that combines the\nneed for urgent practical decision making with profound questions about the\nvalue and meaning of democracy.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In my previous blog<\/a> I discussed how far it would be an affront to democratic values to hold a second referendum, given the need to respect legitimate democratic procedures.\u00a0 I suggested that procedural fairness required a clear procedure, and the well-known flexibility of the UK constitution did not give the required clarity in the first referendum.\u00a0 In this blog I consider whether a second referendum would be wrong because it would violate the sovereignty of the people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are many who think that democracy means that the people are sovereign and so the will of the people, as revealed in the referendum of June 2016, should be respected.\u00a0 Leave aside the dubious notion that a plurality of individuals can have a singular will, a myth which I have discussed in The Will of the People: A Modern Myth<\/a><\/em>.\u00a0 Is it not the definition of democracy to say that it is a political system in which the people are sovereign?\u00a0 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rousseau famously said that the\nBritish people thought themselves free, but they were really free only once\nevery five years when they exercised their sovereignty in voting.  Had he been alive today, Rousseau might have\nadded that they could also exercise their sovereign freedom in referendums alongside\ngeneral elections.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But what, if anything, could it possibly\nmean to say that the people are sovereign? \nOne answer sometimes given to this question is to say that the people\nare sovereign because they are entitled to have the decisive say on political\nquestions.  The sovereign in a political\nsystem is the body or person who gets the last say on any political decision.  So, echoing Rousseau, some say that popular\nsovereignty is exercised at election time, when the people pass their judgement\non the government of the day, and it is similarly exercised by a referendum. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, this account of sovereignty\nas designating the body that has the final say is misleading. The test of\nsovereignty is not \u2018who has the final say?\u2019, but \u2018who determines the rules that\ndetermine who has the final say?\u2019  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sovereignty is about the rules for\nmaking rules.  Sidney and Beatrice Webb\nwere said to have an agreement under which Sidney would take the important\ndecisions and Beatrice the unimportant decisions, but it was Beatrice who decided\nwhat was important and unimportant.  In\nthat sense, Beatrice was the sovereign.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So it is with political\nconstitutions.  A constitution is the\nbody of rules that determine how the primary rules of law and policy are to be\nmade.  So the sovereign cannot be the\npeople taken as a whole, because the people cannot make the rules by which\nprimary rules are to be made.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A constitution may give the people a\ndecisive role in making some primary rules, as for example with Article 46 of\nthe Irish constitution requires proposals agreed in parliament for\nconstitutional change to be submitted to a referendum.  Yet, that cannot mean that there is a body\ncalled \u2018the people\u2019 can determine whether or not they get the final say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Appearances are often deceptive in\nthis regard.  Many constitutions proclaim\nthemselves in the name of the people, as in the famous \u2018We the People\u2019 at the\nopening of the US constitution.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, as Walter Lippmann pointed\nout many years ago in his book The Public Philosophy<\/em>, the US\nconstitution was not drawn up by the people. \nIt was drawn up in 1787 by selected representatives of the states\ngoverned by the Articles of Confederation and their document was ratified in constitutional\nconventions, the delegates to which were selected by eligible electors.  Of the total population of around four\nmillion people, only 500,000 were eligible electors, and only about one-fifth\nof those eligible favoured the constitution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The most common mistake that is made\nwhen referring to the sovereignty of the people is to commit a sort of\nnaturalistic fallacy.  It is the fallacy\nof assuming that the sovereignty of the people is a brute fact about the world,\nakin to the forces of gravity acting on the tides or the tendency of acids to\ndissolve metals.  But of course the\nsupposed sovereignty of the people is no such thing.  It is an institutional and constitutional fact,\nthe product of rules and conventions, sustained through continued political\nagreement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If we talk about \u2018the people\u2019 having\nthe final say on a political question, this can only mean that there is a\nconstitution that gives the people this role. \nBut the sovereignty of the people can never exceed that given to them by\nthe constitution.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the UK this is reflected in the\nview that in 2015 parliament delegated the decision on Brexit to the British\npeople. But, since no parliament can bind its successors, a subsequent\nparliament has the constitutional power to revise that earlier decision.  It might not be wise or politically prudent\nto do so, but it would not violate something that is sometimes known as the\nsovereignty of the people.<\/p>\n<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Brexit is an issue that combines the need for urgent practical decision making with profound questions about the value and meaning of democracy.  In my previous blog I discussed how far it would be an affront to democratic values to hold a second referendum, given the need to respect legitimate democratic procedures.\u00a0 I suggested that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":122,"featured_media":2434,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1390,1395],"tags":[],"coauthors":[1584],"class_list":["post-2433","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brexit","category-comment"],"amp_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/A-Second-Brexit-Referendum-The-Myth-of-Popular-Sovereignty-mauro-mora-85112-unsplash-scaled.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2433","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/122"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2433"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2433\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2434"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2433"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcoauthors&post=2433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}