Arndt Leininger, Hertie School of Governance

Direct Democracy and Representative Government

Direct democracy, allowing the people to directly vote on the questions parliaments generally vote on, has a driving appeal in appearing to be one of the most obvious institutionalizations of democracy itself. Consequently, it is often proposed as an antidote to perceived shortcomings of representative democracy.

Among the many hopes and countervailing fears that exist with regard to the introduction or expansion of direct democratic institutions I identify two issues that I regard as most pervasive: representation and citizens' attitudes. Firstly, proponents of direct democracy argue that it allows citizens to correct unpopular decisions made my representatives. Furthermore, it supposedly leads policy makers to pay greater heed to public opinion. Skeptics fear that in the contrary direct democracy allows special interests to have even more influence on policy making. They doubt that the public can serve as a better policy maker than representative governments. Secondly, many hope that direct democracy can trough providing better representation and more participatory opportunities re-engage citizens with (representative) democracy. In my paper-based dissertation I explore the political effects of direct democracy, aiming to provide stylized facts how it affects representation of citizens as well as their attitudes.

In a first paper, I investigate the effect of the citizen's initiative on representation. Representation is a basic tenet of democracy; it implies that policy should correspond to citizens' preferences. While there is a general correspondence between public opinion and policy making occurrences of policy-opinion incongruence are frequent. Direct democracy is widely thought to improve representation. I consider game theoretic models of the initiative process to synthesize hypotheses regarding its effects on representation. Such models suggest that the initiative not only has an influence on policy through successful popular votes but also through the behavior of forward looking legislators who factor the possibility of initiatives into their decisions. I conduct a quantitative analysis of public policy and opinion in U.S. states to test my hypotheses.

In subsequent papers, I focus on the nexus of direct democracy and public opinion. One of the main impetuses behind direct democracy is that is that it can supposedly remedy declining citizen participation and satisfaction with government in particular or democracy in general. I will conduct comparative survey analysis to investigate the effect of participatory institutions on popular attitudes towards politics, government and democracy. Another question I address therefore is whether wide-ranging popular support for direct democracy really reflects a genuine desire for more participatory opportunities or is just an expression of dissatisfaction with representative democracy.