Ruling through referendum

On Sunday, Italy holds a referendum to decide whether Berlusconi should sell his TV channels.

Referendums have proved a remarkably powerful tool to force legislative change in Italy since the early Seventies, allowing people to intervene directly on matters that Parliament either cannot or will not handle on its own.

Until the recent change from a proportional to a first-past-the-post electoral system, the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate were so preoccupied with party in-fighting that legislation was often ignored or passed with painful slowness.

In the Fifties and Sixties governments resorted to passing decrees to push through business, and then renewed the decrees when Parliament failed to ratify them within 60 days.

But in the Seventies a new political impetus came from the maverick libertarian Radical Party. In 1974, the Radicals collected the requisite 500,000 signatures to hold a referendum on divorce and, despite the opposition of the Christian Democrat establishment, won the vote decisively, overtuning the exiting law which prohibited divorce.

Four years later, the very threat of a referendum on abortion was enough to prompt Parliament into passing one of the most liberal abortion laws in Europe.

Sunday's referendums - 12 in all, covering topics as diverse as shop- opening hours and the confinement of Mafia suspects - follow the Radical Party tradition. The media referendums were called by a group of anti- Berlusconi activists. The fact that so many are being held at the weekend is testimony that the new electoral rules have not significantly improved Parliament's ability to function.

Referendums can only be used to abrogate clauses in existing laws. That means that if the laws are complicated, as they are on media ownership, the questions on the ballot paper are convoluted.

Most politicians agree that media ownership is not the kind of issue that should be decided by popular consultation, and will need careful deliberation in Parliament, whatever Sunday's result.