Familiar Choices: Reconsidering the Institutional Effects of the Direct Initiative

Abstract

AbstractEmpirical evidence suggests that voters in states with direct democracy feel better prepared to cast competent votes and that they do so at a greater rate than voters elsewhere. What causal mechanism explains why the presence of direct democracy leads to better civic citizenship and differences in political behavior? We use a survey experiment in which we randomly vary the text used to describe the policy proposals to consider one possible pathway that explains higher levels of political competence among voters in initiative states. In contrast to the focus on campaign mobilization in the existing literature, we rely on insights from consumer decision theory to derive testable hypotheses about voter behavior. We find evidence that voters in initiative states approach political campaigns in a fundamentally different way than voters in noninitiative states. In particular, we show that individuals in initiative states are less susceptible to framing effects—in our experiment, strategic efforts to craft a ballot measure's title and summary.