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What a change! For centuries Europe was the powerhouse of undemocratic practices and authoritarian rule worldwide. The bigger countries of the continent competed in waging war against one another and trying to colonize as many societies as possible around the globe by force. In just half a century, however, Europe has become an avantgardist in democratization. And as recently as 1989, millions of citizens built new and strong foundations for people power by proclaiming: “We are the people”.

This paper deals with the question of how voters behave in referendums. More specifically, the question is whether referendums on EU treaties are decided by the voters’ attitudes in general, and to Europe in particular (the issue-voting explanation), or by the voters’ attitudes to their national political parties and incumbent national government (the second-order election explanation)? In the first section, a theoretical model for referendum behaviour is presented and discussed. In the next section some expectations derived from the model are applied to the 2005 EU referendums in Spain, France, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. No empirical test of precise hypotheses is made, as the necessary data for such tests was not available at the moment of writing, but an attempt is made to outline under what circumstances the voting in referendums is determined by the attitudes of the voters or by cues from reference groups.

Compared with previous treaty ratifications, the proposed constitution for the European Union (EU) has triggered an unprecedented number of referen-dums. Overall, citizens in ten EU member countries were scheduled to express their view on the EU constitution. Two of these referendums resulted, however, in negative outcomes, namely the ones in France and the Netherlands. This put a rather abrupt stop to the ratification process for this new treaty. This possibility of “involuntary defections” (e.g., Schelling 1960, Putnam 1988, Iida 1996) may - according to several theoretical mod-els relying on two-level games - have affected the bargaining which took place at the Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) called to adopt the final version of the EU constitution. As an additional constraint on ratification, referendums may have strengthened the bargaining position of some negotiators, according to Schelling’s (1960) “paradox of weakness”. For this to occur, however, referendums must have been perceived as a credible op-tion for the ratification process during the negotiations, and they needed to add an additional hurdle to ratification. In this paper we propose initial systematic tests of this proposition for the negotiations which led up to the adoption of the EU constitution at the June 2004 IGC.

April 2004 saw another invalid referendum vote in Slovakia, because of a low turnout. The referendum, called as a result of a petition initiated by the Trade Union Confederation (KOZ) and the opposition Smer party, asked the voters to call upon the parliament to dissolve itself and hold a new parliamentary election. Once again, the referendum question, the referendum campaign, the legal status and the results were subjects of political struggles and intense interest from abroad. As with every referendum in Slovak history, the political and economical stability of the country came into question.

Constitutionalism, traditionally addressed to national polities, is a widespread expression of democratic governance based on the rule of law, the fundamental rights of the citizens and the sharing of power among legitimate and accountable political actors. In addition to these immovable contents, it is often claimed that the legitimate foundation of a democratic constitution requires the agreement of the sovereign, that is to say, the constituent act of the people of the national community^1. Therefore, the democratic legitimacy of the national constitution derives from the consent of the citizens, preferably expressed through a constituent referendum. Once the political community has been constituted, a constitutional democracy could enshrine additional devices of direct democracy for the purpose of occasionally expressing the popular will by ballot.

In recent decades there has been a progressive improvement in the methodology of research into the subject of “direct democracy”, in particular in relation to direct-democratic practice in Switzerland and the US federal states (especially California), and to the 44 individual cases of popular votes on the issue of European integration. Empirical research into direct democracy has also generated a number of extensive academic databases on the subject. In addition to the data collated by C2D (including that collected by Beat Müller) and by the Initiative and Referendum Institute (University of Southern California), the relevant collections of Butler/Ranney (1994), Hans-Urs Wili (e.g. 1997) and the yearbooks of IRI Europe (2002, 2003) are sources of important data. Background information on Swiss politics, the Swiss political system and their connection with popular votes is always included in the yearbook of Swiss politics (published in French and German by the Institute of Political Science at the University of Berne as Année politique suisse and Jahrbuch für schweizerische Politik ). There is thus a basic foundation of data normally available for research on the subject. But in the context of an increasing geographic spread of direct-democratic procedures, a growing institutional diversification and an increasing use of popular referendums worldwide, academic research on this subject acquires a growing importance. The increasing diversification also of academic approaches to the subject makes it appropriate to ask whether and to what extent the informational foundation for new and extended research programs can be expanded and perhaps made accessible for secondary analyses from a variety of methodical approaches.