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Voting for direct democratic participation: evidence from an initiative election

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Abstract

We study a constitutional change in the German State of Bavaria where citizens, not politicians, granted themselves more say in politics at the local level through a state initiative election in 1995. This institutional setting allows us to observe revealed preferences for direct democracy and to identify factors which explain these preferences. Empirical evidence suggests that support for direct democracy is related to dissatisfaction with representative democracy in general rather than with an elected governing party.

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Notes

  1. Public pressure on this matter forced the governing party CSU to give up their general position against citizen participation, and they subsequently campaigned for their own proposition of a weakened version of citizen participation.

  2. An instrumental variable approach suggests that the causal relationship most likely runs from stronger electoral support to voting against direct democracy. Results are presented in Online Appendix to this paper.

  3. Hessami (2014) looks at the introduction of direct mayoral elections. Direct mayoral elections provide an additional form of direct voter participation which was introduced simultaneously in the beginning of the 1990s (not in Bavaria which had direct mayoral elections since 1946). Asatryan et al. (2014) and Asatryan et al. (2016) study the policy outcomes (spending and taxation) of direct democratic initiatives at the local level. Finally, Arnold and Freier (2015) investigate the prevalent relationship between the number of initiatives and formal hurdles in the state constitution.

  4. In 2000, the Bavarian state election law (Landeswahlgesetz) was changed due to a decision of the Bavarian Constitutional Court. If a referendum and a counterproposal are submitted, voters have now more than one vote, and in case more than one option wins a majority of the votes, a tie-break vote is necessary (Bayerisches Gesetz- und Verordnungsblatt Nr. 15/2000, p. 365).

  5. See Kauder and Potrafke (2016) for a discussion of the political landscape in Bavaria and the rent extraction of the CSU in supermajorities.

  6. After a term in the State government the Liberals did not manage to win any seats in the 2013 election.

  7. Famous but failed attempts to expand direct democracy include proposals in 1981, 1985, 1987 and 1991 (Bayerischer Landtag 1991, p. 400)

  8. The protocol of the plenary session in 1995 states: “Der Bürgerentscheid ist eine Spielwiese für Volksverführer und Demagogen. Die vom Volk gewählten Vertreter in den kommunalen Parlamenten sollen entmachtet und die Mehrheiten von aktionistischen Minderheiten terrorisiert werden.”

  9. The Social Democrats officially supported the initiative. Informal interviews and personal conversations with former social democratic mayors, however, make us believe that this position was rather taken in opposition to the governing CSU than out of support for more local direct democracy.

  10. In 1999, the Bavarian Constitutional Court decided upon the introduction of a quorum. Since then, local initiative elections are only successful when they achieve a quorum of approval which depends on the population size of the municipality.

  11. Today, at the national level CSU politicians often argue for more direct democratic participation.

  12. For the IV estimation in Online Appendix, we have added additional data on the Share of Agricultural Soil Surface, which is then used as the instrument for the strength of the conservative CSU.

  13. Note that the average weighs all municipalities equally, i.e., independent of population size. We therefore observe a small difference between average approval in our sample (54.2 %) and the official result of the initiative (57.8 %).

  14. Some local groups affiliate with the state CSU such that there is no registered list bearing the term “CSU” in local elections.

  15. Total turnout was 43.8 % for a change in the waste disposal law in 1991 and 39.9 % for a constitutional reform and abolishment of the Senate in 1998. Recent turnout for referendums in 2013 was higher because state elections were held the same day.

  16. It could be argued that the electorate may vote for the initiative because voters might have an interest in setting the political agenda. However, this argument leaves open the question why a higher strength of the CSU (or other parties) should be associated with more demand for direct democracy if not because of discontent with the governing party. Importantly, discontent with the governing party does not need to result in lower support for it in elections as electoral support depends on the alternatives offered by other parties.

  17. Note that a somewhat smaller estimate at the local level is also consistent with the idea that some of the voters indeed prefer to control their local parties. In the end, the point estimate is still negative such as to defend that the dissatisfaction effect with representative democracy is prevailing.

  18. In the Online Appendix, we also explore the effects of other parties such as the SPD or the free voter associations and other local independent parties, for which we have no clear hypothesis for the effect.

  19. An alternative explanation is that the effect of the CSU mayor is already captured by her/his party.

  20. We are aware of the endogeneity of this variable. Still, we think that reporting this interesting correlation is of value to the reader. Reassuringly, results remain entirely stable when dropping turnout for the initiative from the model.

  21. Note that voters may also express discontent with specific parties by not voting for them. Such electoral punishment is necessarily incomplete, as electoral terms in Bavaria span 5–6 years and politicians may deviate from their voters either way (see, e.g., Brunner et al. 2013; Portmann 2014).

  22. For these 25 cities, we are lacking mayoral election results as well as the number of parties running for the municipal council, which is why we excluded them in the baseline specification. Here, we include them to show that they do not bias the general results.

  23. As we use only one cross section, we do not have a natural level to cluster the observations. Given that the municipalities are organized in counties, we tried to cluster the standard error by county (71 clusters) to allow for cross-dependencies on this level (results not reported). The results remain entirely robust.

  24. Note that parties at the local level in Germany do not have formal coalition agreements. Decisions are made on a case-by-case basis with potentially changing majorities. Hence, it is difficult to know what party is in fact the ruling party. We turn to the mayor’s office instead and measure whether the CSU is holding the mayor’s office.

  25. Reasoning the other way around, one can also ask which value of \(\delta \) would be needed to make the identified set include zero. We find that this maximum possible value of \(\delta \) is 6.49, implying that selection on unobservables would need to be more than six times as large as selection on observables to bias our coefficient in a way that the sign would change.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Florian Ade, Dirk Foremny, Benny Geys, Arndt Leininger, Serguei Kaniovski, Mark Kayser, Gebhard Kirchgässner, Katharina Hofer-Jaronicki, Manfred Holler, Peter Haan as well as anonymous referees and seminar participants at the ECPS 2015 meeting in Groningen, the IIPF at Dublin, the DIW Berlin and the FU Berlin for valuable comments and suggestions. Ronny Freier gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Fritz Thyssen foundation (Project: 10.12.2.092). The usual disclaimer applies. An earlier version of this article circulates with the title Voting for Direct Democracy: Evidence from a Unique Popular Initiative in Bavaria

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. DIW, Mohrenstraße 58, 10117, Berlin, Germany

    Felix Arnold & Ronny Freier

  2. Free University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Felix Arnold & Ronny Freier

  3. University of Bayreuth, Bayreuth, Germany

    Magdalena Pallauf & David Stadelmann

  4. CREMA, Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts, Basel, Switzerland

    David Stadelmann

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  1. Felix Arnold
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Correspondence to Ronny Freier.

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Arnold, F., Freier, R., Pallauf, M. et al. Voting for direct democratic participation: evidence from an initiative election. Int Tax Public Finance 23, 716–740 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10797-016-9398-z

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