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Postsecular Catholicism: Relevance and Renewal

the Brexit national referendum campaign, the literatures on direct democracy and deliberation have explored how referendum campaigns may develop populist, polarizing, and emotionalizing dynamics, leading to conservative rather than progressive decision-making where the outcome of voting may reflect people’s lacking information on the consequences of decision-making or the preferences of majorities. Extending the focus of research, this first systematic study on social movement activism and referendums shows the unexpected outcomes of referendums when protest creates new discursive spaces, democratic openings, and opportunities from below, reflecting the impact of social movements’ prefigurative, participatory democratic, and deliberative practices. Based on theories of ‘‘eventful protest’’ (della Porta 2008), della Porta and her coauthors discuss how referendums can be more contentious and polarizing or more deliberative and dialogue-oriented depending on the particular context. In all cases studied, social movements, unlike their institutional allies or nemeses, were less bound by institutional constraints and used referendum campaigns to create critical awareness about the political implications of a referendum. One cause for the empowering effects of protest is the breaking with familiar institutional politics, potentially opening public spaces to challenge power-holders and institutions. Given the nonlinear, contingent character of referendum campaigns, activists may use multiple formal and informal political opportunities; they can intervene to challenge dominant media framings of the referendum—creating turning points or intervening in moments of institutional disagreement to exploit the ambivalent, open-ended nature of official referendum campaign processes—or create their own campaigns and framing to make visible political alternatives outside familiar institutional dynamics. A thought-provoking insight from this study for theorists of democracy, neoliberal globalization, and Europeanization is that social movements used and created referendums in coalition with political parties as a direct democratic tool to resist the devastating social and political consequences of neoliberalism. Comparison shows that despite different, partly contrasting campaign dynamics and varying themes, civil society and social movement activists across countries succeeded to engage previously absent masses into political participation, deepening both the deliberative quality and inclusion of political debate as well as enhancing broader participation in the referendum itself. Independence movements reacted to the failure of political representation by the intermediary institutions of governments and institutions, including center-left parties in government who participated in imposing harsh neoliberal austerity reforms, in part dictated by the European Union. Likewise, in Italy, the water campaign reflected civic struggles for environmentalist justice and against neoliberal policies to privatize public goods. If protest is a direct reaction to the cooptation of democratic institutions by economic interests, it would have been interesting to deepen the analysis and discuss its implications to understand right-wing populist and nationalist political actors and their mobilization of referendum campaigns. Previous research on referendum has focused on how institutional parties, governments, and media influence citizens, but this superbly written analysis is unique in exploring the critical agency of social movement networks and coalitions in developing the critical framing and mobilization potential to challenge top-down referendum campaigns.