Veto Referendum

Another version of the referendum is what we call veto referendum. Here the competencies to launch the vote and to determine the voting content are located within the representative system as well. A decision on a new law is taken by majority according to the respective regulations. Yet in this referendum type, launching a vote is available for structural minorities within the representative system. The purpose is to block legislation via a public vote. Two different versions of minorities apply. The first version refers to minorities within one political institution. This can be a prescribed number of members of parliament in one chamber or in bicameral-systems a minority in one and/or both chambers.

The second version of minority refers to a minority within the political system not only in one institution. This can be in a bicameral system when one chamber is entitled to veto a law proposal coming from the other by referendum. Also, votes by the executive/president fall into this category when the president is entitled to veto a law coming from parliament by initiating a referendum. In both parliamentary and presidential systems, the government may lack a proper majority in parliament and regulations may allow such mechanism of power division. 

Above we cited Altman/Sanchez who mention that the term plebiscite marks votes used for “the bypassing of one representative institution by another (usually the executive avoiding the legislative branch)” (Altman/Sánchez, 2020: 29). In our understanding, this constellation is not necessarily problematic but can be interpreted as a result of the division of power and as a tool to release blockages (Hornig, 2011b).
This constellation of a veto-referendum is not always present in the literature (see for example Vatter, 2009; Altman/Sánchez, 2020: 34). Moeckli combines the referendum and veto-referendum in one type, which “can be triggered by the legislature (or parts of it), the executive (or parts of it) or (a certain number of) subnational entities” (Moeckli, 2021: 6). Nonetheless, we take such a veto referendum into account in our typology as a separate type to highlight this function of power division.