Completed Research Project
- Title / Titel

- The Political Effects of Referendums. A Systematic Cross-National Study
- Summary / Zusammenfassung
- The project focuses on the policy effects of referendums in a cross-national perspective (the EU, Switzerland, Norway). The central research question is whether the presence of direct-democratic institutions leads to a closer correspondence between public preferences (i.e., the median voter) and policy outcomes than what is otherwise the case; and, if so, whether different types of direct-democratic institutions have different effect in this respect. Our a priori assumption is that direct democracy does make policies more public-preference oriented, the more so the easier it is for citizens to launch a vote on a given issue. We use three types of information: measurements of policy outcomes (gleaned from Blanpain's /International Encyclopaedia for Labour Law and Industrial Relations/ analysed with 'Wordscores'); measurements of public opinion (taken from various cross-sectional surveys); and detailed information on existing direct-democratic institutional provisions.
- Keywords / Suchbegriffe
- referendums, political institutions, policy effects
- Project Leadership and Contacts /
Projektleitung und Kontakte
- Funding Source(s) /
Unterstützt durch - SNF (Personen- und Projektförderung), Other Public Sources (e.g. Federal or Cantonal Agencies)
- In Collaboration with /
In Zusammenarbeit mit
George Tsebelis, UCLA Initiative and Referendum Institute | United States |
| Alexander Trechsel, C2D, University of Geneva | Switzerland |
- Duration of Project / Projektdauer
- Mar 2005 to Feb 2007