Allure or Alternative? Direct Democracy and Party Identification

Matthias Fatke ()

No 4, University of Bern Social Sciences Working Papers from University of Bern, Department of Social Sciences

Abstract: This paper presents the first investigation of whether and how party identification is influenced by direct democratic institutions. The concept of party identification is of central interest to political science. Despite declining partisan attachment and increasing dealignment among voters, little systematic evidence exists as to which factors influence individual party identification. Our paper contributes to improving on this lacuna by considering the educative effects of direct democratic institutions. Theoretically, two competing hypotheses are plausible. On the one hand, direct democracy might strengthen political parties and promote the need for cues so that voters succumb to the allure of partisan attachment. On the other hand, direct democracy might provide an alternative to the representational function of political parties thus rendering party identification less essential. Drawing on recent data from the Swiss cantons, we estimate multilevel models. Our analyses, though giving support to the alternative-hypothesis, yield some surprising findings.

Keywords: Direct democracy; Party identification; Political parties; Dealignment; Educative effects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2013-09-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://repec.sowi.unibe.ch/files/wp4/fatke-2013-dd_and_pid.pdf First version, 2013 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bss:wpaper:4

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in University of Bern Social Sciences Working Papers from University of Bern, Department of Social Sciences
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ben Jann ().