The Impact of Direct Democracy on Governance: A Replication and Extension

Abstract

Does the state ballot initiative process affect American states' ability to meet widely accepted standards of "good governance?" This question is relevant in many places, but especially in California which makes the heaviest use of the popular initiative. While much recent non-academic work suggests the process has ill effects in the Golden State and elsewhere, there has been little systematic scholarly investigation of this topic; the notable exception is R.J. Dalton's work in 2008. Building on, updating, and extending his study, we examine whether the presence and extent of ballot initiative use affects Government Performance Project grades. Controlling for many other variables, we find a generally negative relationship between initiative use and such grades. This has worrisome implications for governance.

Knowing and distrusting: how political trust and knowledge shape direct-democratic participation

“…Partly as a consequence, several representative democracies have introduced direct-democratic features such as referendums and citizens' initiatives that allow citizens to take part in the political decision making (Setälä and Schiller 2012;Qvortrup 2013). Although the empirical evidence on the purported benefits of such direct-democratic features is mixed (Matsusaka 1992(Matsusaka , 2005Lac and Lascher 2013;Leemann and Wasserfallen 2016), the aspiration is to sustain democratic legitimacy by increasing popular involvement.…”

“…Previous studies have examined the impact of cognitive mobilization and political dissatisfaction on demands for direct democracy (Dalton et al 2001;Bowler et al 2007;Anderson and Goodyear-Grant 2010), focused on broader process preferences (Bengtsson and Mattila 2009;Webb 2013;Coffé and Michels 2014;Bengtsson and Christensen 2016) or the intention to take part in direct-democratic procedures (Kentmen-Cin 2014). Most studies of direct democracy concern the causes and consequences at the macrolevel (Barankay et al 2003;Lac and Lascher 2013;Leemann 2015;Leemann and Wasserfallen 2016). Although studies of individual-level factors associated with the use of direct-democratic instruments do exist (Sciarini et al 2016;Christensen et al 2017), they fail to examine the interplay between cognitive mobilization and political dissatisfaction in shaping direct-democratic involvement.…”