Parties and Direct Democracy: Does Parties’ Performance Influence Public Support on Referendum?

• In Event: 444 - Section on Political Sociology Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 12. Political Parties in Power and Under Attack

Abstract

This paper examines a model for ‘who supports direct democracy.’ There are various types of direct democracy and referendum is the most institutionalized since the referendum has an intersecting point with representative democracy and even becomes good substitutes. Thus, it is reasonable to argue that referendum is the most accessible and popular form of democracy. Existing researches have made two models for who supports direct democracy including a referendum. ‘Political disaffection model’ and ‘cognitive mobilization model.’ The former means those who are disappointed with and excluded from representative democracy would support the referendum. On the other hand, the latter means those who have greater political resources would support the referendum. I found there are some mistakes in existing researches. (1) They have not classified disaffection with parties from that with the institution. (2) They have ignored both separate models can be integrated into a single model. (3) Researches are based on European countries only. This paper is distinguished with existing researches in that the hypothesis is those who have high political resources but are even disappointed with political parties would support the referendum. It would be evidenced by the case of Korea as a proxy of the non-European country. I used Korean General Social Survey(KGSS) data in 2004 and applied multi-variate regression model to show the relationship between integrated model and supporting the referendum. Thus, I found that political disaffection model and cognitive mobilization model can be integrated well and the integrated model is appropriate even out of European countries.

Author

• Dongwoo Park