Direct Democracy and Policy Responsiveness Using Cardinal Scales

• In Event: New Methodological Approaches in State Politics Research

Abstract

Owing almost entirely to the legacy of California’s Proposition 13 and other tax cutting measures, the conventional wisdom for some time has been that the ballot initiative process in the United States has been a tool of political conservatives. In recent years, however, leftist groups have rediscovered a process that they once would have eagerly done away with. The academic literature on this question has been largely supportive of the idea, arguing that progressives in recent years have been able to use majority opinion to craft progressive policy at the ballot box. Scholars suggest that (1) there has been a shift in the ideological promise of ballot initiatives in the United States, and (2) this is evidence that ballot initiatives institutionally are responsive to public opinion. However, arguments in multiple studies pointing to progressive wins in ballot initiative elections have focused nearly exclusively on the policy of the minimum wage. In this paper, we test whether the initiative responsiveness argument is generalizable to both time constraints of when studies have been conducted, and to other issues. To do this, we examine policy responsiveness on two issues where the measurement of policy preferences is available on a cardinal scale – the state minimum wage and the state sales tax. Our approach uses an original national survey and multilevel regression with post-stratification to generate state-level estimates of state level public opinion and bias on these issues.

Authors

• John Cluverius, University of Massachusetts Lowell

• Joshua J. Dyck, University of Massachusetts Lowell

• Edward L. Lascher, California State University-Sacramento