Elsevier

Electoral Studies

Volume 29, Issue 3, September 2010, Pages 509-520
Electoral Studies

Electoral and structural losers and support for a national referendum in the U.S.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2010.04.017Get rights and content

Abstract

The U.S. is one of only a few democracies in the world never to hold a national referendum. Recent national surveys reveal that a majority of respondents approve of a national referendum both cross-nationally and in America is relatively stable. Building on previous work (Bowler and Donovan, 2007), we find public opinion on a reform proposal is fluid and responsive to electoral politics, rather than stable as reported in earlier work. In this paper, we argue that contemporary support for a national referendum in the U.S. is contingent on whether a citizen is a short- or long-term “winner” or a “loser” when it comes to electoral politics. We expect that public support for a national referendum in the U.S., where legislation referred by Congress would be subject to a popular vote, may vary at the individual level because of short-term electoral fortunes as well as long-term structural conditions. Strategic voting as well as losing in candidate races and policy issues may be important, but so might be partisanship, with non-partisans the most likely to benefit from citizen law-making at the national level. Support for a national referendum might also be contingent upon state context, that is, upon use of direct democracy in the state where a person lives, as well as the population of a state. The results based on a natural experiment and 2008 panel survey data provide an important window into understanding public opinion on institutional change more broadly.

Section snippets

Support for institutional change: short-term electoral and long-term structural losers

We argue that mass support for a national referendum might be a function of a citizen’s short-term electoral fortunes as well as the long-term structural conditions under which ‘losers’ find themselves to be underrepresented. Of course, with high levels of approval for a national referendum, it is not only losers who would like to see the adoption of the plebiscitary mechanism at the national level. Nevertheless, we suspect that losers – in terms of their immediate electoral fortunes as well as

Expectations, data, and methods

We test two general hypotheses with respect to support for a national referendum in the U.S. They are grouped into long-term structural losers versus short-term electoral losers. Long-term structural losers are tested a number of different ways. We expect independents to be more likely to support a national referendum than partisans who regularly are advantaged under a two-party majoritarian electoral system. We expect residents of large population states whose collective voice and

Who supports a national referendum pre-election?

We begin by examining the long-term factors increasing support for a national referendum prior to the 2008 general election (October wave) in Table 1. Column 1 reports covariates for Republicans and non-partisans with Democrats as the reference category, while column 2 includes covariates for Democrats and non-partisans with Republicans as the reference category. This same pattern is repeated in Table 2, Table 3 of the paper. Marginal effects are reported in the column to the right of each

Conclusion

Drawing on the growing literature of winners and losers, and utilizing pre- and post-election panel data from the 2008 general election, we have identified certain segments of the population that are more willing than others to have elected officials grant citizens plebiscitary power. We find opinions on an electoral reform proposal to be fluid and responsive to electoral politics, rather than constant and stable as reported in earlier work. Our results are consistent with Bowler and Denovan

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      Electoral losers in majoritarian systems are therefore “less satisfied with the way democracy works” than their counterparts in more proportional systems (Anderson and Guillory, 1997, 68). Several studies suggest that support for out-of-government parties increases support for referendum use (Karp and Banducci, 2008; Smith et al., 2010). Along these lines, Bernauer and Vatter (2012) find that electoral losers are more satisfied with democracy in more proportional systems and in countries that employ popular vote processes.

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      Furthermore, Smith et al. (2010) find that referendum support is also shaped by short-term electoral fortunes: being a winner or loser in the electoral arena is an important force that can either increase or decrease support for a national referendum. Based upon multiple-survey data, they show that U.S. citizens “supporting the losing presidential candidate (…) are considerably more likely to favour a national referendum after the election, but not before, as their loser status had not yet been conferred upon them” (Smith et al., 2010, p. 519). In a recent contribution to this body of literature, Werner (2019) argues that individuals take instrumental considerations into account when expressing support for forms of political decision-making, such as referendums.

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