Vox Populi

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

In the framework of the Swiss Chair Seminar Series, this session features a presentation by Professor Lucas Leemann (University of Zurich).

Direct democratic institutions are often introduced by popular vote, but there is little research on what makes voters support these new instruments. Taking advantage of a unique data set on the ideological positions of voters and members of parliament, this paper examines popular support for the adoption of the popular initiative in Switzerland in 1891. We find that voters support the popular initiative if they are inadequately rep- resented in parliament. Such representation deficits are likely in case of electoral systems that are prone to majoritarian and partisan biases and thus lead to the systematic underrepresentation of large groups. Moreover, the analysis shows that voters understand the strategic implications of adopting the popular initiative for enforcing more inclusive decision-making and increasing the level of policy congruence. We find that support for the adoption of the popular initiative increases with the ideological distance to the median legislator, whereas support decreases as the ideological distance to the median voter grows. These effects remain robust when controlling for party vote shares, socioeconomic structures, sociodemographic variables, turnout, and direct democratic traditions at local level. Finally, the paper shows that ideological distances also matter for voters of the ruling party, which helps explain why a majority of voters support a political institution that constrains the ruling party’s room for maneuver.

Authors: Lucas Leemann, Patrick Emmenegger, and André Walter