Iceland’s Constitutional Reform Referendum

Alan Renwick

Iceland held a referendum over the weekend on the reform of its constitution.  The results are now in and show strong public support for change.  That doesn’t necessarily mean that change will actually happen, as, under Iceland’s existing constitution, the referendum result is only advisory.  If constitutional reform is actually to take place, Iceland’s parliament will have to vote for it before the next election (due next spring) and then vote for it again after the election.  Still, there is much interesting material for us to chew over in the outcome of the popular vote.

First, the table below gives a quick overview of the result.

Sources: Questions translations are from the government’s website on the referendum: http://www.thjodaratkvaedi.is/2012/en/referendum/the-ballot.html.  Voting figures are from the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service: http://www.ruv.is/frett/lokatolur-i-thjodaratkvaedagreidslu.

Support for change is clearly strong.  That conclusion has to be qualified by the low turnout, at 48.9 per cent (compared to 85.1 per cent at the most recent general election).  But institutional questions are never likely to excite the whole population.  In fact, impressive numbers of Icelandic voters have engaged with these relatively abstruse matters and have delivered a decisive overall verdict.

It is worth while to look also at the regional breakdowns.  On five of the questions, there is a Yes vote from every region.  The one exception is question 5.  At present, voters outside Iceland’s metropolitan south west are overrepresented in parliament.  Question 5 proposes to end that and give votes equal weight across the country as a whole.  Unsurprisingly, the regional breakdown shows marked disparities in the vote on this question:

Opponents of equal votes may be tempted to argue that the result does not give politicians a mandate to make the change: they may argue that majority support in each region would be required for that to be the case.  This would be a valid argument if it were thought appropriate for each region to have absolute veto power over such questions.  But there is no such principle in the Icelandic constitution.  Rather, the principle at present is that the non-metropolitan regions should have slightly more weight in decision-making than their population alone would entitle them to.  We can use this as the basis for interpreting the referendum result by recalculating the result with the regional votes weighted according to their shares of parliamentary seats rather than their shares of voters.  If we do this calculation, the outcome is still a decisive Yes vote: the weighted Yes vote is 61.2 per cent, compared to 65.5 per cent for the unweighted vote.  Under current Icelandic constitutional practice, therefore, it appears clear that question 5 has delivered a mandate for change.

What can students of democratic reform around the world learn from all of this?  First, Iceland is among those countries—Ireland is the most obvious other example—where the economic crisis of recent years has led to fundamental questioning of the effectiveness of prevailing political institutions.  It contrasts with other countries—such as the United Kingdom—where economic woes have drawn attention away from democratic reform debates, allowing supporters of the status quo to argue that this is hardly a time to fritter time away on institutional details.  Exactly what determines which of these mechanisms dominates in each country is not yet entirely clear, but deserves much further attention.

Second, Iceland’s voters want a stronger voice: in particular, they want more influence over which individuals (as well as which parties) represent them in parliament; and they want to make more decisions themselves through referendums.  Such patterns may not be surprising.  But they are worthy of note, because they fit into a growing pattern—noted, for example, by Bruce Cain and colleagues—that affects many countries.  My own recent work with Jean-Benoit Pilet (the most recent public version is here, but we will be publishing a revised version soon) shows a trend towards more personalized electoral systems across European democracies over the last two decades.  Iceland has already been part of that trend, and the referendum result makes it more likely that it will go further.  This increases our confidence that the trend we have identified is not about to go away.