Indeed, Socrates

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

Via Lindsay, Portugal's referendum to legalize abortion until the 10th week of pregnancy was just approved by 59% of voters. While turnout was too low for the referendum to be binding -- you need 50% of the population to vote, and only 40% did -- Prime Minister Jose Socrates is interested in passing abortion legalization through the legislature. Trends in Portugal are positive for abortion legalization, with a similar referendum 9 years ago having lost 51-49 with even lower turnout.

I had a post planned on how the author of this article uncritically takes the views of someone associated with the American Center for Law & Justice seriously on abortion laws in Europe. The ACLJ is a right-wing pressure group that opposes abortion rights and tries to keep Ten-Commandments-related monuments up in public places. But as it turns out, the article is at right-wing site CNSnews, so I suppose that's par for the course.

On a more wonky note, minimum thresholds on turnout for ballot referenda aren't a great idea. I understand the need to prevent small minorities from dictating policy. But if polling shows the vote going pretty strongly in favor of a referendum, and there's a serious question about whether it'll hit the turnout threshold, opponents ought to sit out the vote and defeat the referendum that way. Voting systems should be designed to minimize strategic voting (or non-voting, as it were) of this kind. Leaders like Prime Minister Socrates can act against this tendency by using the numbers from the referendum to build support for passing laws in the usual representative-democracy way, but then we might just as well use opinion polls instead of ballot referenda. And in any decent representative democratic system, there'll be enough pressure on legislators to do as their constituents want them to.