Although the United Kingdom’s entry to the European Community (EC) in 1973 was initially celebrated, by the end of the first year the mood in the UK had changed from ‘hope to uncertainty’. When Edward Heath lost the 1974 General Election, Harold Wilson returned to No. 10 promising a fundamental renegotiation and referendum on EC membership. By the end of the first year of membership, 67% of voters had said ‘yes’ to Europe in the UK’s first-ever national referendum. Examining the relationship between diplomacy and domestic debate, this book explores the continuities between the European policies pursued by Heath and Wilson in this period. Despite the majority vote in favour of maintaining membership, Lindsay Aqui argues that this majority was underpinned by a degree of uncertainty and that ultimately, neither Heath nor Wilson managed to transform the UK’s relationship with the EC in the ways they had hoped possible.

On 27 May 1967 a remarkable event occurred. An overwhelming majority of electors voted in a national referendum to amend clauses of the Australian Constitution concerning Aboriginal people. Today it is commonly regarded as a turning point in the history of relations between Indigenous and white Australians: a historic moment when citizenship rights -- including the vote -- were granted and the Commonwealth at long last assumed responsibility for Aboriginal affairs. Yet the constitutional changes entailed in the referendum brought about none of these things. "The 1967 Referendum" explores the legal and political significance of the referendum and the long struggle by black and white Australians for constitutional change. It traces the emergence of a series of powerful narratives about the Australian Constitution and the status of Aborigines, revealing how and why the referendum campaign acquired so much significance and has since become the subject of highly charged myth in contemporary Australia. Attwood and Markus's text is complemented by personal recollections and opinions about the referendum by a range of Indigenous people, and historical documents and illustrations.

Democracy on demand is a most comprehensive analysis of the good, the bad, and the ugly aspects of referendums and the challenges to modern democracy. It shows how democracy is vulnerable, and how it can be saved from demagogues.

A #1 national bestseller, winner of the QWF Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction, and finalist for the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction and the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing, The Morning After is a sly, insightful and wonderfully original book from one of Canada's most popular political analysts, Chantal Hébert, and one of Quebec's top political broadcasters, Jean Lapierre. Only the most fearless of political journalists would dare to open the old wounds of the 1995 Quebec referendum, a still-murky episode in Canadian history that continues to defy our understanding. The referendum brought one of the world's most successful democracies to the brink of the unknown, and yet Quebecers' attitudes toward sovereignty continue to baffle the country's political class. Interviewing seventeen key political leaders from the duelling referendum camps, Hébert and Lapierre begin with a simple premise: asking what were these political leaders' plans if the vote had gone the other way. Even two decades later, their answers may shock you. And in asking an unexpected question, these veteran political observers cleverly expose the fractures, tensions and fears that continue to shape Canada today.

This book reviews the research on campaigns and elections and investigates the effects of campaigning in referendums, drawing on panel survey data, media content data, focus groups, and interviews with journalists and campaign managers. The authors argue that the media coverage not only influences public perceptions of the campaign, the referendum issue and the party leaders, but that, in a close race, it also shapes the voting and the political future of the incumbent party. The first study to investigate the dynamics and effects of a referendum campaign on politicians, media and citizens, this innovative volume will be of interest to students and researchers of political communication.

The 1980 Quebec referendum was a momentous event that redefined Canada's nationalist ideologies. While the political implications of the referendum have been widely analysed, this is the first sustained study of the role played by the media in shaping and interpreting the referendum campaign. Robinson addresses interrelated issues in public opinion creation during the 1980 campaign. She explores how the ideologies of Quebec and Canadian nationalism were constructed and modified by the separate French and English networks, and how their idiosyncratic visual styles and thematic selections reinforced Montreal viewers' linguistic and political divisions. In addition, Robinson compares French and English media professionals and discovers how their work settings and their perception of their roles had become polarized a decade before through the imposition of the 1970 War Measures Act. The two journalistic groups were affected by its imposition in radically different ways, resulting in much more self-censorship and bland programming on the part of the French media than the English during the 1980 referendum. Finally, Robinson demonstrates how the instant playback capabilities of television, newly developed at the time of the referendum, have affected news discourses and turned electoral coverage into personalized and sensationalized 'tabloid formats.' These formats narrowed citizen's abilities to conceive of alternative political interpretations and actions.