Referendums and Plebiscites
There is no modern political institution that is more democratic than the referendum. Popular elections of officeholders are commonly assumed to be the hallmark of a democracy, but this is a misconception. Although electing representatives is a process inherent in modern representative systems, it is not a process of direct self-government. Only the referendum exhibits democracy in its purest form. It is the Athenian assembly or the New England town meeting expanded in size to include the thousands or millions of citizens in a modern polity. It is the citizenry directly considering and voting on government policy.
Terminology
Although referendums are nearly as old as democracy itself, the term is not. The alternative term "plebiscite" has a much older lineage. It is derived from the Latin plebiscita, describing votes of the Roman plebs in the fourth century B.C.E. The term was applied to popular consultations in France from 1793 onward. It was also used to describe votes resolving League of Nations boundary disputes and in Nazi Germany to describe popular votes legitimizing the regime's policies.
The term "referendum" can be traced to seventeenth-century Switzerland, in which members of the Diet of the thirteen-canton (or thirteen-state) Swiss Confederacy (1513–1798) took policies back to their respective cantonal councils or populations ad referendum et instruendum ("for referring back and instructions").
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