Referendums and Voters’ Consent to Democracy: An Experimental Approach

• In Event: Emotions, Political Attitudes and Referendum

Abstract

Along with the recent wave of populism in Europe, calls for more direct democracy are growing in many representative democracies, from the `yellow jacket' protesters in France to the right-wing `Alternative for Germany'. Theoretically and empirically, however, it is unclear if the demand for more popular referendums in particular derives from intrinsic procedural preferences about the nature of democratic decision making or mainly reflects self-interested instrumental beliefs about policy outcomes. The extent to which dissatisfied citizens support referendums because they expect different policy outcomes has important consequences for the ability of institutional reforms to cope with the citizens’ current increasing distrust with democracy. If institutional preferences are mostly instrumental, more direct democracy is unlikely to address public dissatisfaction with democracy, as any policy making procedure is bound to generate winners and losers. We design a conjoint survey experiment, to be run in France and Germany in nationally representative samples, to address this issue. The design experimentally varies the policy issue, policy outcome and the process. This enables us to assess whether policy losers' consent is higher when a referendum is used compared to law-making in parliament. In addition to analyzing whether instruments of direct democracy may improve democratic legitimacy, the paper also contributes to the on-going debate about the existence and scope of process-based theories of political attitudes.

Authors

• Michael Becher, IE University

• Sylvain Brouard, Sciences Po