The referendums of consequence, which tackle issues that politicians refuse to legislate on themselves, rarely have anything to do with money (at least directly).
The great victories in the referendums of the 1970s and '80s on divorce and abortion would have been impossible without the agitation of the feminist movement.
Referendums of governmental authorities take place when a president, cabinet, or legislature decides, under preregulated conditions or ad hoc, to call a popular vote on a particular issue.
It also may be the end of an era in Quebec politics, highlighted by the referendums of 1980 and 1995 on the issue of separation from Canada.
But that only prompted the Democratic legislature to come up with alternative flag designs and referendums of its own.The resulting soap opera included walk-outs and arguments about the correct size of a state flag.
It may lead to ever closer union for a while, but every moment in history says that, at some time, such hauteur will be swept aside, as it almost was in the referendums of 2005.
A lot of Quebeckers who see the PQ as a desirable government for their province, and may support independence in some abstract way, have little appetite for another bout of angst and turmoil of the sort that convulsed Quebec and divided families and friends in the referendums of 1980 and 1995.
There is a vague promise of referendums of local parents on the fate of the existing 160-odd grammar schools, but the further consultation proposed in the white paper seems to be a means of delaying the whole matter in the hope that it simply goes away.Overall, the white paper avoids the worst pitfalls and contains many sensible proposals.
While Mr. Morales said he believed dialogue was still possible, he left open the prospect that the Bolivian electorate could be the ultimate arbiter of the dispute, either through a referendum on the constitution or recall referendums of the president and regional governors.
Experts had always calculated that a "no" vote in Sweden would strengthen anti-euro sentiment in Denmark and Britain, delaying efforts in those two countries to hold referendums of their own, and therefore depriving the currency of broader economic and political backing.
Labor, exhausted by the marathon, by the perverse acceleration of time that had aged a still youthful government, fundamentally worn down by the rolling moral panics and the instant referendums of the social media age, was simply trying to move on past the debacles of the Rudd/Gillard civil war, including the debacle of an election campaign that began to make sense only in its closing week.
