Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind? Mobilization cascades in direct democratic initiatives

Abstract

Caveat emptor: I have retired this manuscript. I will not improve on it any more, and it will not be published in a peer-reviewed journal.This paper explores the possibility of mobilization cascades in direct democratic popular initiatives. A mobilization cascade is a salience-based mobilizing effect whereby one popular initiative has a positive mobilizing effect on a subsequent popular initiative that deals with with a similar policy issue. The existence of a mobilization cascade would imply that voters develop salience for and positive attitudes towards policy issues merely through direct-democratic exposure to those policy issues in the recent past. In order to explore the mobilization cascade, I analyze three popular initiative pairs from Switzerland from the years 2012, 2013 and 2014. In each year, two initiatives dealt with similar policy issues, and the second initiative in each pair was making more far-reaching demands. The results suggest that a mobilization cascade might exist, but that it is probably a weak effect.