A Cross-National Comparative Study of the Policy Effects of Referendums

Abstract

With the adoption of new constitutions in Eastern and Central Europe containing numerous provisions allowing for referendums, cross-national comparative work on the policy effects of referendums across the European continent have become possible. This allows us to close an important gap in the literature on referendums, namely to assess the consequences of these institutions at the national level. More precisely, we wish to assess whether the well-documented policy effects at the subnational level (e.g., in the United States or Switzerland) carry over to the national level. Some of these subnational studies support the theoretically derived implication that the possibility of referendums leads to policies more closely reflecting the voters' wishes. The present paper provides empirical tests of this, but contrary to other empirical studies so far, proposes a comparative analysis at the national level. For several policies in the domain of labor regulation we show that the presence of institutions allowing for referendums reduces the difference between policy outcomes and the voters' wishes as assessed in surveys. We carry out these tests on the basis of several datasets covering a range of mainly Western countries, and rely on a diverse set of methodologies to assess policy outcomes.