Comments on: Does the Citizen Initiative Weaken Party Government in the U.S. States? http://abstractpolitics.com/2008/07/does-the-citizen-initiative-weaken-party-government-in-the-us-states/ Notes on political science research Fri, 27 Jan 2012 21:06:03 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: Adam <span class="status">The post author</span> http://abstractpolitics.com/2008/07/does-the-citizen-initiative-weaken-party-government-in-the-us-states/comment-page-1/#comment-22 Adam The post author Mon, 21 Jul 2008 22:03:51 +0000 http://abstractpolitics.com/?p=22#comment-22 Matt, my criticism is based on the evidence in Bowler and Donovan (2004), "Measuring the effect of direct democracy on state policy: Not all initiatives are created equal." Their argument is that the deterrent effect can't work well if citizens can't credibly threaten the legislature with an initiative because it's too danged hard to get an initiative on the ballot. They give about a dozen variables as I recall, divided into two dimensions: Ease of qualifying a proposal for the ballot, and difficulty to the legislature to amend or ignore an initiative. In fairness to Phillips, I was fiddling with a working paper a couple years back and found that an initiative dummy alone worked as well as all the variables in Bowler and Donovan, at least for my research question. But once I inserted a control for how many times the initiative process had actually been used in each state over the previous decade--which gets at the same concept as Bowler and Donovan's index--the initiative dummy was blown out of the water. To me, that means that an initiative dummy alone isn't good enough. Bowler and Donovan's index might also not be good enough. But you if you're going to base your argument on the "threat" created by the presence of direct democracy, you need to pay some attention to whether that threat is credible. Matt, my criticism is based on the evidence in Bowler and Donovan (2004), “Measuring the effect of direct democracy on state policy: Not all initiatives are created equal.” Their argument is that the deterrent effect can’t work well if citizens can’t credibly threaten the legislature with an initiative because it’s too danged hard to get an initiative on the ballot.

They give about a dozen variables as I recall, divided into two dimensions: Ease of qualifying a proposal for the ballot, and difficulty to the legislature to amend or ignore an initiative.

In fairness to Phillips, I was fiddling with a working paper a couple years back and found that an initiative dummy alone worked as well as all the variables in Bowler and Donovan, at least for my research question. But once I inserted a control for how many times the initiative process had actually been used in each state over the previous decade–which gets at the same concept as Bowler and Donovan’s index–the initiative dummy was blown out of the water.

To me, that means that an initiative dummy alone isn’t good enough. Bowler and Donovan’s index might also not be good enough. But you if you’re going to base your argument on the “threat” created by the presence of direct democracy, you need to pay some attention to whether that threat is credible.

]]> By: Matt <span class="status">Unregistered</span> http://abstractpolitics.com/2008/07/does-the-citizen-initiative-weaken-party-government-in-the-us-states/comment-page-1/#comment-21 Matt Unregistered Mon, 21 Jul 2008 21:36:35 +0000 http://abstractpolitics.com/?p=22#comment-21 Is it really that big of a problem to just dummy direct democracy? Sure, it might vary from state to state, but even in states where the initiative is rarely used you still have the indirect deterrent effect. Is it really that big of a problem to just dummy direct democracy? Sure, it might vary from state to state, but even in states where the initiative is rarely used you still have the indirect deterrent effect.

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