Partisan Campaigning and Initiative Petition Signing in Direct Democracies

Katharina Hofer

Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics, 2017, vol. 153, issue 3, 261-291

Abstract: Summary This paper investigates whether popular initiatives signed by a larger share of the population have higher acceptance rates at the subsequent vote. The main analysis is based on all Swiss federal initiatives voted between 1978 and 2000 with a panel of aggregate voting data at cantonal level. The results suggest that petition signing is positively and significantly related to acceptance rates at ballot. I address potential omitted variable bias from underlying preferences which might be driving both signatures and acceptance rates in three ways. First, the panel structure of the data allows to control for time-constant preferences via fixed effects. Second, results are robust to various proxies for voter preferences. Third, using the doubling of the signature requirement in 1978 as an instrumental variable confirms the above result. The findings imply that petition signing can serve as an effective partisan campaigning tool.

Keywords: D72; Initiatives; signatures; direct democracy; voting; campaigning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/BF03399509 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
Journal Article: Partisan Campaigning and Initiative Petition Signing in Direct Democracies (2017)
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:spr:sjecst:v:153:y:2017:i:3:d:10.1007_bf03399509

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/41937

DOI: 10.1007/BF03399509

Access Statistics for this article

Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Marius Brülhart

More articles in Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics from Springer, Swiss Society of Economics and Statistics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().