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As the referendum becomes a more regular component of decision making, it leaves few, if any, institutions, processes and values of democracy untouched. Political actors of all kinds - including political parties and interest groups - seek to use the referendum device to further their own objectives. The end result is a different kind of democracy than existed before. This book lays out the comparative research agenda on the impact of referendums on the practice of liberal democracy.

This study investigates how the information environment in the Danish 2000 euro referendum campaign served to crystallize opinion on the issue within the context of a number of other hypothesized influences on the vote, based on previous studies of referendum voting. Our data include a nationally representative two-wave panel survey & a content analysis of news coverage during the referendum campaign. We develop a weighted measure of exposure to news on public & private television channels, that takes into account the volume & tone of the coverage toward the YES & NO campaigns, & using this we find that exposure to public television news significantly influences vote choice when controlling for other predictors. We also find varied levels of support for hypotheses concerning the influence of other key variables such as ideology, economic evaluations, government approval, & issue-specific contextual variables. The findings emphasize the importance of considering the information environment during referendum campaigns. 2 Tables, 1 Appendix, 56 References. Adapted from the source document.

Abstract.  This study investigates how the information environment in the Danish 2000 euro referendum campaign served to crystallize opinion on the issue within the context of a number of other hypothesized influences on the vote, based on previous studies of referendum voting. Our data include a nationally representative two‐wave panel survey and a content analysis of news coverage during the referendum campaign. We develop a weighted measure of exposure to news on public and private television channels, that takes into account the volume and tone of the coverage towards the YES and NO campaigns, and using this we find that exposure to public television news significantly influences vote choice when controlling for other predictors. We also find varied levels of support for hypotheses concerning the influence of other key variables such as ideology, economic evaluations, government approval and issue‐specific contextual variables. The findings emphasize the importance of considering the information environment during referendum campaigns.