Abstract
Despite the strong theoretical expectations about the beneficial effect of direct democratic instruments on citizens’ political support, the empirical evidence is scarce and inconsistent. We add to this literature by studying the effect of the use of a direct democratic process on citizens’ political support and its underlying causal mechanism. Using a unique research design that combines a strong test of causality with a high level of ecological validity, we surveyed inhabitants of a Belgian neighborhood that held a local referendum and a comparison group (i.e. inhabitants of a comparable neighborhood without referendum) before and after the referendum (n = 1049). Using difference-in-differences analysis and first difference regression analysis, we show that in line with our expectations the increase in political support following the referendum is not driven by involvement or procedural fairness perceptions but by an increase in support levels among the winners of the decision. Moreover, despite the contested nature of the issue, losers’ level of political support did not decrease significantly after the result of the referendum was announced.
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Notes
In the empirical literature citizen involvement, also using direct democratic processes, is often theorized as more fair than purely representational processes. Yet we could question whether this reasoning holds for democratic minorities. While scholars have looked into the nature of the outcome of direct democratic processes and whether they harm minorities (Donovan and Bowler 1998; Haider-Markel et al. 2007; Vatter and Danaci 2010), empirical evidence on how minorities evaluate these procedures is lacking.
Following Altman (2014), we can distinguish between different types of direct democratic instruments based on who took the initiative, whether it is binding and whether it is proactive or reactive. While inhabitants did not formally gather signatures to demand for a referendum, it is clear the direct democratic process was the result of popular demand. The process can be best characterized as a bottom-up rather than a top-down process as it was organized as a reaction to protest from citizens against a proposed decision and citizens were included in drafting the answering possibilities.
All respondents were originally contacted by post. They also had the opportunity to complete the questionnaire online using their personalized login data that was distributed together with the postal survey.
Based on the information from the city’s register of residents, we compared those 1,049 respondents that answered twice with the respondents that answered only once or not at all. Results show no statistically significant difference on the 5% level in terms of sex. With an average age of 52, the group of consistent respondents is significantly older than the group of non-respondents and respondents that participated in only one wave. The average age in this group is 45. In the entire sample that we drew, the average age is 47.
Unfortunately, no voter validation data is available in Belgium. The fact that we can predict the outcome of the referendum well seems to indicate that rather than biased self-reports, the overrepresentation of voters in our sample is driven by a higher non-response among non-voters.
We used fiscal data from the Belgian Federal Government from 2008 because it was the most recent data available for statistical sectors at the time of sampling.
Data and replication code for the analyses and figures is available at the journal’s Dataverse page (see https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/WKQTNZ).
The careful monitoring of both neighborhoods and interviews with policymakers and civil society organizations did not point at another major political event in the city during this timeframe that could help us explain the differential trends in the comparison group. While explaining the reason for the trend in the comparison group is beyond the scope of the study, we should note that the possibility of change in the comparison group is exactly why we included a comparison group in our design. This second sample allows us to take changes over time into account that are unrelated to the referendum. Given that the likelihood of a referendum is as large in both neighborhoods and our survey reveals the policy change resulting from the referendum was not seen as influential to the inhabitants in the comparison group, it is safe to assume the changes in citizens’ support in the comparison group are unrelated to the referendum in another neighborhood of the city.
Introducing these variables singlehandedly into the analysis does not change the main conclusion of this additional analysis: The effect of participation in the referendum on changes in trust on local authorities and democratic performance evaluations is not mediated by procedural fairness perceptions or perceptions of influence on the decision-making process.
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Acknowledgements
The study was funded by a BELSPO Interuniversity Attraction Pole Grant (PARTIREP II) and a FWO Project Grant (G075615N). A large number of colleagues provided valuable comments during various phases of this project. The scholarship of Peter Esaiasson inspired this project significantly. We also want to acknowledge the three anonymous reviewers, Marc Hooghe, Yue Hou, Kristof Jacobs, Arndt Leininger, Cherie Maestas, Peter Miller, Diana Mutz and Min Reuchamps for their creative and valuable suggestions. We wish to thank Greet Louw for research assistance. Earlier versions were presented in 2016 at the ECPR General Conference, WAPOR-RECSM Political Trust Conference, the annual meetings of MPSA, APSA and the Dutch and Belgian Political Science Association. We wish to thank all participants for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript.
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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.
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Marien, S., Kern, A. The Winner Takes It All: Revisiting the Effect of Direct Democracy on Citizens’ Political Support. Polit Behav 40, 857–882 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-017-9427-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-017-9427-3