Abstract:This article aims to identify the institutional factors that make a referendum successful. This comparative analysis seeks to explain the success of top-down referendums organized in Europe between 2001 and 2013. It argues and tests for the main effect of three institutional factors (popularity of the initiator, size of parliamentary majority, and political cues during referendum campaigns) and controls for the type of referendum and voter turnout. The analysis uses data collected from referendums and electoral databases, public opinion surveys, and newspaper articles. Results show that referendums proposed by a large parliamentary majority or with clear messages from political parties during campaign are likely to be successful.

This article compares the use of referendums across political regimes over time in Europe. It does so on the basis of a new typology that differentiates between policy domains and degrees of abstraction. The analysis shows different patterns in referendum use between authoritarian regimes, countries in transition and democracies. In addition to the variation in policy domains, the findings indicate different institutional features within the polity types: the process of initiation, the turnout in referendums and the rate of approval. The empirical evidence draws on an original dataset of 620 referendums organised at national level in Europe between 1793 and 2017.

Referendums campaigns are important and earlier research closely analysed their general functioning, effects on turnout, and the importance of media and information for voting behaviour. However, the role of referendum campaigns as such (with all its components) in shaping voting behaviour was widely neglected. This article seeks to partially fill this gap in the literature and argues that referendum campaign is an important predictor of the voting decision as long as people perceive it as informative and follow it. We investigate this effect in the context of three referendums organized in 2015-2016 in Bulgaria, Poland and Slovakia. The results indicate that these two variables explain the decision of citizens to support referendums across different settings. Their effects are consistent and significantly stronger than alternative explanations employed in the literature such as the limited effect of campaigns, second-order elections, partisan cues or amount of information received.

One of the core principles of social democracy is the equality between citizens. However, in Europe, several social democratic parties have recently supported referenda against same-sex marriage. This paper aims to examine factors which drove left-wing parties to disregard the principle of equality by comparing the four most recent same-sex marriage referenda in Croatia, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia between 2013 and 2018. Results of the qualitative analysis indicates that these behaviours can be explained by a combination of electoral decisions, government strategies and other ideological components.

While much research has been devoted to the effects of inequality on political participation, little attention has been paid to how different kinds of subjective perceptions of social inequality affect citizens’ political behaviour. This is important since these perceptions shape the message that reaches political decision-makers when addressing concerns over social inequalities. This article differentiates between sociotropic and egocentric perceptions of social inequality and explores to what extent individuals’ perceptions of such inequality affect engagement in institutionalized and non-institutionalized political participation between elections. Engagement was evaluated with a survey among a segment of the Finnish population (n = 1673). Our results indicate that citizens with sociotropic concerns are more likely to get involved in both institutionalized and non-institutionalized forms of political participation, whereas egocentric perceptions have less of an impact. Furthermore, the associations are moderated by left–right ideology: sociotropic concerns are more strongly expressed among left-wing voters, whereas right-wingers are more likely to be propelled to action by egocentric concerns.