The Social Choice of EU Treaties
| Published date | 01 December 2007 |
| Date | 01 December 2007 |
| Author | Mogens K. Justesen |
| DOI | 10.1177/1465116507082813 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
The Social Choice of EU
Treaties
Discrepancies between Voter
Preferences and Referendum Outcomes
in Denmark
Mogens K. Justesen
University of Southern Denmark, Denmark
ABSTRACT
The article applies Social Choice theory to analyse new and
so far undiscovered aspects of the Danish referendums on
the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 and 1993. The article queries
whether the amended Maastricht Treaty adopted in 1993
was, in fact, the most preferred alternative for a majority of
Danish voters. A reconstruction of voter preferences regard-
ing the political alternatives in the European Union – the
Maastricht Treaty, the amended Maastricht Treaty and the
Status Quo – reveals that the amended Maastricht Treaty,
despite the fact that it was the Condorcet winner and won
the 1993 referendum, may not have been preferred by a
majority but was probably the most preferred alternative
only for a minority of the electorate.
537
European Union Politics
DOI: 10.1177/1465116507082813
Volume 8 (4): 537–553
Copyright© 2007
SAGE Publications
Los Angeles, London, New Delhi
and Singapore
KEY WORDS
Maastricht Treaty
referendum
social choice
voting
Introduction
In 1992 and 1993 Danish voters faced a fundamental choice concerning the
future of Danish integration in the European Community/Union (EC/EU).
Voting on the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, a small majority of 50.7% of the voters
rejected the treaty, whereas a year later a majority of 56.7% of the voters
accepted an amended version of the Maastricht Treaty. A common perception
of the results of these referendums is that they somehow reflect the ‘will of
the people’, i.e. that the amended version of the Maastricht Treaty represents
the Danish electorate’s collectively most preferred outcome. Indeed, the very
raison d’être of referendums supposedly is that they somehow express some
form of popular will. This justification for referendums is associated with
what William Riker (1982) calls the ‘populist’ conception of democracy. On
this view, referendums are perceived to be a fairer and more democratic way
of making political decisions, since the collective choice is made directly by
the voters (i.e. ‘the people’) rather than by indirect means, e.g. through legis-
lation in parliament (see Siune and Svensson, 1993: 100). One important virtue
of referendums is, no doubt, that they allow voters to express their prefer-
ences directly regarding one or more policy issues. However, this does not
mean that the outcome of referendums necessarily reflects a common elec-
toral will or a unique social welfare function in any meaningful sense. In fact,
from a social choice theory perspective, such a conception of referendums is
misconceived mainly owing to a lack of awareness of the way referendums
are designed and the importance of the institutions and collective choice
mechanisms that amalgamate individual preferences into a social choice (see
Nurmi, 1997; Brams et al., 1997, 1998; Saari, 2001).
However, whereas social choice theory notoriously tends to emphasize
problems that appear to be nothing but theoretical constructs and that are
difficult to corroborate empirically, mainstream approaches to the study of
referendums within political science have witnessed a surge in empirical
analyses of EU referendums in recent years (Siune and Svensson, 1993; Siune
et al., 1994; Franklin et al., 1994, 1995; Hug and Sciarini, 2000; Christin and
Hug, 2002: Svensson, 2002; Franklin, 2002; Hobolt, 2006, 2007). Many
resources have been devoted to examining factors influencing voter decisions
in referendums on European integration, for instance the role of information,
campaigning, party alignment, and party endorsement of the issue in
question (e.g. Siune and Svensson, 1993; Hobolt, 2006, 2007). In this regard,
a particularly contested issue is whether voters in EU referendums primarily
vote according to policy preferences or according to their (lack of) support
for the incumbent government (see Svensson, 2002; Franklin, 2002; Garry
et al., 2005). Indeed, the relative importance of policy issues versus concerns
European Union Politics 8(4)
538
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