Who Signs? Ballot Petition Signatures as Political Participation

Abstract

Who signs ballot initiative petitions? Do they fit a particular socio-political and demographic profile of a likely voter, or are they peripheral voters who become engaged in the political process due to the issue at hand? And are some citizens who sign petitions more likely to have valid signatures than others? Scholars have been slow to assess who is likely to become engaged in perhaps one of the most common forms of political participation: signing a ballot petitions. Drawing on an original dataset of individual-level data, we use GIS and logit models to test which citizens were more likely to sign a contoversial local ballot petition, as well as to determine who was likely to sign a valid (or invalid) petition.