The Electoral Allure of Direct Democracy: The Effect of Initiative Salience on Voting, 1990-96

Lacey, Robert J.

doi:10.1177/153244000500500204

Cited by 46 publications

(45 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…On the one hand, research investigated the effect of direct democracy on participation in elections, closely looking at factors on the individual level such as demographic and attitudinal traits, levels of education, or differences in social status (Lacey 2005;Leighley and Nagler 1992;Rosenstone and Hansen 2003;Tolbert and Smith 2005). On the other hand, similar to our study, scholars have documented attitudinal and behavioral effects of direct democratic procedures on citizens (Barber 1984;Mendelsohn and Cutler 2000;Pateman 1970).…”

Section: Political Parties Versus Direct Democracysupporting

confidence: 59%

Does Political Representation through Parties Decrease Voters' Acceptance of Decisions?

et al. 2013

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Are decisions by political parties more or less accepted than direct-democratic decisions? The literature on parties as brand names or labels suggests that the existence of political parties lowers information and transaction costs of voters by providing ideological packages. Building on this important argument, we posit that this informational rationale for parties is not universally applicable and is contingent on the context of the decision that is made. Intermediary political decision-making institutions may impose additional costs on voters in situations where the decision is perceived to be personally important to the individual voter. We conduct an experimental online vignette study to substantiate these claims. The results imply that a combination of representative democracy and direct democracy, conditional on the distribution of issue importance among the electorate, is optimal with regard to acceptance of a decision.Are decisions by political parties more or less accepted than direct-democratic decisions? We conduct an experimental online survey to disentangle voters' procedural acceptance of both decision-making mechanisms and finally compare it to the acceptance of expert committees as a third mode of political decision-making. With our results, we seek to qualify the literature on parties as brand names or labels (e.g., More specifically, we argue that the acceptance of decisions does not vary per se and irrespectively of context between different modes of decision-making. Instead, it is is contingent on the subjective importance that a voter attributes to the issue under consideration, controlling for personal agreement with the outcome of the decision that is made. Previous research indicates that personally important issues increase people's motivation to systematically process arguments. In contrast if they consider an issue of little importance, they tend to rely on partisan cues (Petty and Cacioppo 1986). We argue that if voters' core interests are at stake, they prefer more individual, immediate control over important decisions instead of a decoupling of decisions from the electorate through intermediary decision-makers. Political decisions on topics in which voters are slightly less interested, however, are equally well accepted no matter how the decision comes about, and unimportant political decisions may be best delegated to representatives. We argue that political parties rightly assume their role of lowering transaction costs of voters for everyday decisionmaking, but they do less well in terms of acceptance for important political decisions.Our argument is structured in the following way. The first section compares theoretical arguments in favor of and against the acceptance of decision-making by political parties and direct democracy, respectively. We set out four hypotheses regarding the procedural acceptance of the different decision-making modes. This is followed by a description of the methodology of survey experiments, the setup of our study, the data collection, and our...

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Section: Political Parties Versus Direct Democracysupporting

confidence: 59%

Does Political Representation through Parties Decrease Voters' Acceptance of Decisions?

et al. 2013

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“…Most studies simply do not address the issue. These include: Tolbert, McNeal, and Smith (2003), who investigate the effects of state ballot initiatives on individual-level voter turnout and political knowledge; Francia and Herrnson (2004), who examine the synergistic effects of campaign effort and electoral reforms on turnout in legislative districts; Carson and Crespin (2004), who study the effects of state redistricting methods on competition in Congressional races; Lacy (2005), who analyzes the effects of salient state ballot initiatives on voter turnout; and Bullock, Hood, and Clark (2005), who estimate the contextual effects of county voting equipment and spoiled ballot rates on individuals' trust in the voting process. 4 In contrast, Branton (2004), who employs exit poll data to estimate the effects of effects of racial and ethnic diversity within districts on vote choice by whites, does adjust standard errors for the clustering of individual exit poll respondents within districts.…”

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confidence: 99%

Estimating the Impact of State Policies and Institutions with Mixed-Level Data

Primo

Jacobsmeier

Milyo

2007

State Politics Policy Q.

342

225

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Researchers often seek to understand the effects of state policies or institutions on individual behavior or other outcomes in sub-state-level observational units (e.g., election results in state legislative districts). However, standard estimation methods applied to such models do not properly account for the clustering of observations within states and may lead researchers to overstate the statistical significance of state-level factors. We discuss the theory behind two approaches to dealing with clustering-clustered standard errors and multilevel modeling. We then demonstrate the relevance of this topic by replicating a recent study of the effects of state post-registration laws on voter turnout (Wolfinger, Highton, and Mullin 2005). While we view clustered standard errors as a more straightforward, feasible approach, especially when working with large datasets or many cross-level interactions, our purpose in this Practical Researcher piece is to draw attention to the issue of clustering in state and local politics research.

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“…Among such initiative fixed effects are campaign efforts at federal level, the existence of a counter proposal, or the country-wide salience of an initiative issue. Salience typically strongly influences voter turnout in the direct democratic context (e.g., DvcK and SEABROOK, 2010;LACEY, 2005, andfor Switzerland LucHINGER, RosiNGER, andSruTZER, 2007). Initiativespecific variables like the time between initiative qualification and the respective ballot or the overall number of signatures are also controlled for by initiative fixed effects.…”

Section: Fixed Effictsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Partisan Campaigning and Initiative Petition Signing in Direct Democracies

Hofer

2017

Swiss J Economics Statistics

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SUMMARYThis paper investigates whether popular initiatives signed by a larger share of the population have higher acceptance rates at the subsequent vote. The main analysis is based on all Swiss federal initiatives voted between 1978 and 2000 with a panel of aggregate voting data at cantonal level. The results suggest that petition signing is positively and significantly related to acceptance rates at ballot. I address potential omitted variable bias from underlying preferences which might be driving both signatures and acceptance rates in three ways. First, the panel structure of the data allows to control for time-constant preferences via fixed effects. Second, results are robust to various proxies for voter preferences. Third, using the doubling of the signature requirement in 1978 as an instrumental variable confirms the above result. The findings imply that petition signing can serve as an effective partisan campaigning tool.

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The Electoral Allure of Direct Democracy: The Effect of Initiative Salience on Voting, 1990-96

Cited by 46 publications

References 16 publications

Does Political Representation through Parties Decrease Voters' Acceptance of Decisions?

Does Political Representation through Parties Decrease Voters' Acceptance of Decisions?

Estimating the Impact of State Policies and Institutions with Mixed-Level Data

Partisan Campaigning and Initiative Petition Signing in Direct Democracies

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