Earlier this year I was put in charge of the seminar speaker series in my department. There had been some grumbling about the rules used during the speaker series last year, and some of my colleagues had strong feelings about the relative merits of different formats. I was happy to oversee the process of inviting speakers, but the last thing I wanted to do was alienate my colleagues over the format of the presentations. So I decided to take a vote, which I set up online using “Survey Monkey”:http://www.surveymonkey.com/ .^1^ (Incidentally, this was also a good way to get suggestions from my colleagues for speakers in the series.) The net result: we switched to a different format, and whenever anyone complains to me about the new format, I can fall back on the election results.
With this in mind, I was intrigued to see the following report in the “CNN Politics Blog”:http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2011/03/22/gov-jerry-brown-tells-california-voters-to-make-the-hard-choice/ the other day:
bq. Democratic California Governor Jerry Brown is calling for a special election on July 7th, where voters will decide between tax extensions or to double up on cuts in state services, in an effort to combat budget woes plaguing the state.
If Brown can actually do something like this, then it seems to me like a brilliant strategic move. Either way, this is going to be painful. But if he actually holds the referendum, then whatever he decides to do, he can always back it up by saying that is the voters’ preferences.
I don’t know much about California politics – so I especially invite people to clarify what is going on in the comments section – but after more digging it looks like CNN may have simplified things a bit and perhaps what is supposed to happen is simply “a referendum on the tax extensions”:http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-23/california-s-lockyer-skeptical-brown-tax-plan-will-be-put-to-referendum.html? But either way, the idea is intriguing: why don’t more chief-executives when faced with these kinds of painful economic decisions let voters choose between two options? The chief-executive would still retain tremendous agenda setting power, but then would have a fall back to “well, this is what the voters want” once the painful measures are instituted. The alternative seems to be that the painful economic changes are “your plan” and we get the plummeting approval ratings of governors like we are seeing in “Ohio”:http://cincinnati.com/blogs/politics/2011/03/23/poll-kasichs-approval-rating-30-percent/, “Michigan”:http://www.freep.com/article/20110322/NEWS15/110322060/Poll-Michigan-Gov-Rick-Snyder-s-approval-rating-deflates-he-dismisses-results, and “Wisconsin”:http://www.hapblog.com/2011/03/wisconsin-governor-scott-walker.html.
Does anyone know if anything like this has ever been done before? Is it something that would be legally permissible according to US State Constitutions?
By the way, Brown also released a YouTube video to explain what he was trying to do, which at my last glance had had 44,000 views:
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^1^ I also decide to add a co-organizer to the seminar series (thank you “Patrick Egan!”:http://politics.as.nyu.edu/object/PatrickEgan), an option that Governor Brown clearly does not have at his disposal at the moment.