On the design of citizens’ initiatives in a union of states

Abstract

The paper studies the design of popular initiatives in unions of states. We analyze the effect of state-specific threshold requirements on the incentives of a rational campaign organizer who decides which constituencies to target. If the heterogeneity of preferences in a population increases with its size, degressively proportional thresholds satisfy the normative objective of ‘neutrality’ between individuals from different states. In contrast, thresholds which are linear in population size are ‘neutral’ if a priori no differences between states are acknowledged.