More or less equality? Direct democracy in Europe from 1990 to 2015

Abstract

Within the last decades, western democracies have experienced a rise of inequality, with the gap between lower and upper class citizens steadily increasing and a widespread sentiment of growing inequalities also in the political sphere. Against this background, and in the context of the current "crisis of democracy", democratic innovations such as direct democratic instruments are discussed as a very popular means to bring citizens back in. However, research on direct democracy has produced rather inconsistent results with regard to the question of which effects referenda and initiatives have on equality. Studies in this field are often limited to single countries and certain aspects of equality. Moreover, most existing studies look at the mere availability of direct democratic instruments instead of actual bills that are put to a vote. This paper aims to take a first step to fill these gaps by giving an explorative overview of the outputs of direct democratic bills on multiple equality dimensions, analyzing all national referenda and initiatives in European democracies between 1990 and 2015. How many pro-and contra-equality bills have been put to a vote, how many of those succeeded at the ballot, and are there differences between country groups? Our findings show that a majority of direct democratic bills was not related to equality at all. Regarding the successful bills, we detect some regional differences along with the general tendency that there are more pro-than contra-equality bills. Our paper sheds new light on the question if direct democracy can serve as an appropriate means to complement representative democracy and to shape democratic institutions in the future. The potential of direct democracy in fostering or impeding equality should be an important criterion for the assessment of claims to extend decision-making by citizens.

Direct democracy and equality: A global perspective

“…The results were also positive for all three dimensions of equality. Furthermore, pro-equality bills were not less likely to succeed at the ballot than contra-equality ones, diverging from findings on European direct democratic votes (Geißel et al, 2019a, 2019b). This contradicts claims of direct democracy being a threat to equality in general.…”

“…12 Breaking down the results revealed that pro-equality referendums were more numerous on each continent. Latin America mirrored the ratio of pro-and contra-equality bills and outputs that Geißel et al (2019aGeißel et al ( , 2019b reported for Europe, while Africa, Asia, and Oceania indicated an even higher share of pro-equality bills and outputs. This suggested that the positive ratio of pro-equality bills and outputs was independent of different political cultures.…”

“…Instead, they strengthen the more positive empirical conclusions from certain studies on European and US direct democratic votes. Compared with research by Geißel et al (2019aGeißel et al ( , 2019b on European direct democratic votes between 1990 and 2015, results for the bill level were roughly mirrored: they found pro-equality bills outnumbered contra-equality ones as well, although the most common dimension in Europe was the socio-economic instead of the political one. 11 However, in Europe, pro-equality bills were less likely to succeed at the ballot compared with contra-equality ones.…”

“…The only analyses taking several equality dimensions into account so far when investigating the outputs of direct democratic votes are those by Geißel et al (2019aGeißel et al ( , 2019b. They found that more pro-equality bills were put to a direct democratic vote in European democracies than contra-equality ones, which is also mirrored by the outputs of these votes.…”

Direct democracy and equality: context is the key

“…Researchers recently found that there have been more successful direct democratic votes in European democracies between 1990 and 2015 (national level) that aimed at fostering equality than at decreasing it. In detail, the equality-related record of direct democratic instruments seemed to depend on the country groups you look at: especially in Switzerland and Eastern Europe, direct democratic votes often lead to positive outputs when it comes to socioeconomic equality, while legal and political equality seem to be enhanced less often (Geißel et al 2019a(Geißel et al , 2019b.…”