The island of Frobnitz is trying to decide whether to legalize left-handed quonkbats. Three million voters are represented by 200 members of parliament. In a referendum, a majority voice support for the measure, so it goes before parliament … which rejects it.

Why? Because most of the MPs’ constituencies oppose it:

With this distribution, more than 55 percent (1,664,000/3,000,000) of the referendum votes are positive, but still more than 5/6 (167/200) of the MPs must vote no if they are to honor the preferences of their supporters.

In Voting Paradoxes and How to Deal With Them (1999), Hannu Nurmi writes, “The practical significance of the referendum paradox is in the shadow it casts on the institution of consultative referendum. Which should be decisive: the majority of the votes cast in a referendum or the majority of the votes of representatives who believe to represent the views of the majority of their supporters? If the former is considered more decisive, why then resort to the latter at all? If the latter is regarded as more important, then why bother with the former at all?”

When developers planned a shopping mall in the southwestern Chinese municipality of Chongqing in 2004, they quickly bought out 280 local homeowners in order to clear the necessary land. They didn’t count on 49-year-old Wu Ping and her husband, Yang Wu, who declined to leave and clung to their two-story brick house even as the developers excavated the land around it and allegedly sent thugs to intimidate them.

The case became a symbol of the struggle between homeowners and property developers as China’s farmland gives way to office buildings and industrial parks. “I’m not stubborn or unruly,” Wu told the state-run Legal Daily. “I’m just trying to protect my personal rights as a citizen.”

Even after electricity and water were cut, Yang cut a makeshift stairway up from the 10-meter pit that surrounded the house and hung a Chinese flag from its roof. He guarded the edifice while Wu conducted press conferences and sent him food, water, and quilts using a rope and pulleys. When the couple turned down compensation offers, the Chongqing housing authority called their demands “unreasonable” and ordered the house demolished. But in the face of 85 percent public support for Wu and Yang, a local court declined to enforce the order.

Finally, after three years, China passed a landmark law protecting private property and the couple accepted an apartment of similar size downtown. “Let’s hope the new law reduces such disputes,” political scientist Zhao Wanyi told China Daily.