h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I am not sure if I have read this properly. Is your government not actually compelled to do the will of the people in a referendum?

The state of California, where I live, was founded by folk who fought powerful entrenched interests, and so it is easy for our people to literally tell the government what to do, whether it pleases them or not. I'm afraid I'm rather provincial in that it never occurred to me that the voters could be directly ignored.

I guess you mean the change to right hand traffic?
Well, I'm not sure what exactly happened since I was not born yet, but I guess that after a couple of years later they just decided to ignore it...

Can you impeach/recall/throwout your officials if they ignore what has been voted, and in this particular case the people just decided not to?

Well I dont know I dont think that has happened ever before.

Fascinating!

Are referenda rare in Sweden?

back up, Referenda?

In sweden the voting system is (in swedish): rådgivande it means that the people is giving an advice about what they should do but the goverment is not obligated to do so. The right traffic isn´t the only time this have happened in fact in most cases the goverment has "ignored" the voting. One exampel i nuclear power, another is when alcohol laws were made in the early 20th century.

A referendum (which I have accidentally and somewhat snootily pluralized 'referenda' as if we were speaking latin) is a general term for any number of public petitions in which there is a vote.

The Bill of Rights, and other Constitutional Ammendments, would be the federal referendums for the United States of America. Because a constitutional ammendment is so difficult to arrange and pass, no attempt has ever been made to do an advisory one, they have all been in earnest. Unfortunately, our presidents and their executive branches have a history of skulduggery in which they are getting away with ignoring these in some or part. This is where someone great like Martin Luther King Jr. comes in.

They can be law-making in California, and have specific peculiar legal names depending on their intended effect. Since they are put on the ballot as 'Proposition x' where x is some byzantinely assigned number (and the numbering system was put in place by a referendum ) they are sometimes also called propositions here. There's no reason you couldn't start an advisory referendum that the government of California could choose to ignore, but in practice, almost nobody does this. Any California executive who ignores a Proposition would be impeached, and any law-enforcing agency that ignores them is begging for a greedy and punitive lawsuit.