Direct Democracy in a Time of Political Crisis

• In Event: 40251 - Political Engagement

Abstract

The ballot initiative is the only large-scale mechanism in American politics that voters can use to propose and pass legislation themselves. In recent years, the results of citizen-initiated ballot measures have repeatedly bucked partisan trends, with voters passing laws that are openly opposed by the local ruling party. In this paper, I present mixed-methods research on the ballot initiative process as it is being deployed and fought over in the United States today, including descriptive statistics of an original, large-N dataset of all 413 state-level citizen initiatives and 45 veto referendums between 2010-2024; qualitative interviews with 65 ballot initiative participants in 15 states plus Washington, DC; and participatory action research on the ground in a state-level ballot initiative campaign in Arizona and municipal initiative in Pennsylvania. The results show increased, and increasingly sophisticated, use of the citizen initiative process by social movements and advocacy organizations as well as escalating attacks against that process from state legislatures, business interests, and lobby groups. The quantitative data shows the remarkable popularity of egalitarian policies – policies that equalize rights, resources, and decision-making power in society – and particularly policies that redistribute wealth from the rich to the rest, despite voting trends to the right in candidate elections. The qualitative data fleshes out a complex and fast-changing field at the intersection of electoral process, social movements, and labor organizations. The surge in egalitarian and redistributive citizen initiatives and their popularity with voters across party affiliation, combined with the concerted effort by authorities to restrict mechanisms of direct democracy, reveal deep class struggle dynamics that may hold a key to our moment of political crisis.

Author

• Benjamin Steinhardt Case, Arizona State University