Does the Popular Vote Destroy Civil Rights?

Abstract

In her paper Putting Civil Rights to a Popular Vote (American Journal of Political Science 41:245-69), Barbara S. Gamble addresses the central and classical issue of whether the majority tyrannizes the minority in a (direct) democracy. She tests the hypothesis that civil opponents who have access to the initiative process will use direct democracy to thwart civil rights (246). On the basis of seventy-four civil initiatives in state and local ballots covering five issue areas (housing and public accommodation of racial minorities, school segregation, gay rights, English language laws, and AIDS policies) between 1959 and 1993, she comes to a firm conclusion: . the answer is quite clear .. anti-civil initiatives have an extraordinary record of success: voters have approved over three-quarters of these.... This pattern holds across all three decades and across all but one of the issue areas ..... (261). We challenge this central conclusion. While Gamble may be right for the period and issues investigated by her for the United States, we find the opposite result for Switzerland where three-quarters of the referenda held worldwide were undertaken (see Butler and Ranney (1994) for an analysis of Swiss democratic institutions, see e.g., Linder 1994; Steiner 1974). In this comment, we do not question her methodological approach. We show that considering the same type of civil issues put to the vote at the Swiss federal level as well as the cantonal and city level (for the case of Zurich), direct democracy protects civil rights. Moreover, we identify conditions under which minority interests have a particularly high probability of success. These may partly explain the striking difference between Gamble's results and ours.