Evaluate the Usefulness of Referendums

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Evaluate the usefulness of referendums. Referendums are useful in some instances but have many faults and I will explore these further on in the essay. In the UK we only have referendums when the government decides it cannot make the decision and wants to ask the citizens of the state, sometime this has worked and sometime it has not. The only way that a referendum will be useful is if the government educates the citizens, so they can make an informed decision. As otherwise the whole Idea of having a referendum will be useless as the decisions made by the citizens could change the way this country runs. An example of this is the referendum in wales about the welsh assembly in 1997 and only 50.1% of the citizens of wales turned up and 50.3% of them voted yes and the other 49.7% voted no. If the government informed the citizens of this referendum more efficiently then the turnout would off been greater, as some people may have not turned up because they did not know enough about the issue to vote. One great thing about referendums is that the citizens get more involved and therefore it is the real form of direct democracy. In one way if the UK had more referendums the direct answer would be that but however that is not true as it links into my previous paragraph. That is that it will cause many problem such as the government spending so much of the public’s taxes on this when not that many people would turn up to vote and that was show in the recent referendum of the AV voting system in the UK in 2011, On a turnout of 42.2%, 68% voted No and 32% voted Yes. All this cost about 90 million pounds and only 42.2% of citizens turned up to vote, this is an atrocity and the direct reason why referendums cannot be justified by say the state wants the citizens to get involved as most of them do not. However referendum can be used to reunite two divided parties when they

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