Direct Democracy's Impact on American Political Institutions

Transcription

1 Direct Democracy's Impact on American Political Institutions

2 Direct Democracy's Impact on American Political Institutions Edited by Shaun Bowler and Amihai Glazer palgrave macmillan

3 * DIRECT DEMOCRACY'S IMPACT ON AMERICAN POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS Copyright Shaun Bowler and Amihai Glazer, Softcover reprint of the hardcover I st edition All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. Pirst published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLANTM 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin's Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN DOI / ISBN (ebook) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Macmillan India Ltd. First edition: May Transferred to Digital Printing 2011

4 Contents List of Figures List of Tables Notes on Contributors Preface Acknowledgments Vll ix xi xv xvii "Hybrid Democracy" and Its Consequences Shaun Bowler and Amihai Glazer 2 Was Rove Right? Ohio's Gay Marriage Ban and the 2004 Presidential Election 21 DanielA. Smith 3 Electoral Supply and Demand: Direct Democracy Campaigns, Political Interest, and Participation 35 Caroline Tolbert and DanielBowen 4 Direct Democracy and the Public Agenda: Ballot Initiatives and Public Beliefs about Important Problems 55 Stephen P. Nicholson 5 Direct Democracy's Effects on Political Parties 69 Shaun Bowler and Todd Donovan 6 The Initiative Process and Interest Group Attention to Legislative Activity 93 Frederick J. Boehmke 7 Direct Democracy and the Executive Branch 115 John G. Matsusaka 8 Direct Democracy and the Stability ofstate Policy 137 Amihai Glazer and Anthony McGann

5 vi CONTENTS 9 Direct Democracy and Good Governance: Does It Matter? 149 Russell[. Dalton Appendix A 169 Appendix B 171 Appendix C 172 References 173 Further Reading 189 Index 191

6 Figures 4.1 The agenda-setting effect of Prop. 8 on the public agenda, Percentage of all initiatives that concern governance issues by decade Numbers of ballot proposals concerning elections and redistricting, Number of reform proposals concerning elections and redistricting passing Ideal point configurations of legislature (L), governor (G), and voter (V) to illustrate the impact of initiative on balance of power The relationship between initiatives passed and government management 157

7 Tables 2.1 Statewide and county averages Percent vote for Ohio's Issue 1 in 2004, percent turnout in 2004, and percent vote for Bush in Impact of exposure to ballot initiatives and initiative campaigns on political interest, 2002 midterm election What matters? Predicted effect of exposure to ballot initiative campaign spending on political interest-by education level Impact of ballot initiative campaigns on political interest and the probability of voting Impact of exposure to ballot initiatives and initiative campaigns on political interest, 2004 presidential election Probit analysis of the agenda-setting effect of Proposition 8, Probit analysis of the agenda-setting effect of Proposition 8 by education, Number and pass rates of governance issues, Bivariate regressions on measures of state parties and their environments Effect of cultural variables and frequency of use of direct democracy on weakening of parties Models of elite opinion toward direct democracy and electoral process Term-limits repeals Endorsements in Washington state voter's guide on selected measures Descriptive statistics Bill involvement and average reasons for choice of high-attention bills by initiative possibility 101

8 x TABLES 6.3 Tabulations of bill interest variables by initiative possibility Tabulations of bill interest variables by organization type and initiative possibility Bill involvement and average reasons for choice of high-attention bills by initiative involvement Negative binomial analysis of number of bills that groups are involved with, by attention level, initiative possibility, and involvement Comparison of executive branch institutions in initiative and noninitiative states, Comparison ofexecutive office salaries between initiative and noninitiative states, Regressions of incumbent party vote share on economic performance and government spending for gubernatorial elections, Effect on budget allocations, annual change (all states) Effect on budget allocations, annual change (Alaska excluded) Effect on budget allocations, mean deviation (all states) Effect on budget allocations, mean deviation (Alaska excluded) Effect on taxes (all states) Effect on taxes (Alaska excluded) Effect on total spending (all states) Effect on total spending (Alaska excluded) State rankings in average governmental performance Correlation between initiative usage and measures of government performance Correlation between initiative usage and measures of educational performance Correlation between initiative usage and measures of tax performance Predicting government performance 164

9 Notes on Contributors Frederick J. Boehmke of the University of Iowa is a leading expert on the relationship between interest groups and the initiative process. He is a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy ( ) in the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan. In addition to a number of articles on such topics as the link between Indian gaming and the initiative, he is also the author of The Indirect Effect of Direct Legislation: How Institutions Shape Interest Group Systems, publ ished by Ohio State University Press (2005). Daniel Bowen is a graduate student at the University of Iowa with interests in state and local politics. He has written on the initiative process and electoral politics. Shaun Bowler, of the University of California, Riverside, coauthored Demanding Choices: Opinion, Voting, and Direct Democracy, published by University of Michigan Press (1998), and coedited Citizens as Legislatures. He is a member of the Board of Scholars of the Initiative and Referendum Institute at the University of Southern California (USC). Russell J. Dalton is the author or editor of over twenty books, including Democratic Challenges, Democratic Choices: The Erosion of Political Support in Advanced Industrial Democracies (2004) and Democracy Transformed? (2003), both published by Oxford University Press. A previous Fulbright Fellow and Marshall Fund Fellow, he was director of the Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of California, Irvine. He is currently on the editorial boards of six journals and has previously been a member of the editorial boards of American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, and Journal of Politics. He has also been a member of the Board of Overseers of the American National Election Study and is a current member of the planning committee of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems project. Todd Donovan coauthored Demanding Choices: Opinion, Voting, and Direct Democracy, published by the University of Michigan Press (1998), and coedited Citizens as Legislatures. Donovan's current book project is a

10 xii NOTES ON CO NTRIBUTO RS comparative treatment of state politics. He is a member of the board of scholars of the Initiative and Referendum Institute and a senior research associate of the University of Washington's Center for American Politics. Amihai Glazer, besides his many publications, is the coauthor of Why Government Succeeds and Why It Fails, published by Harvard University Press (2001). He is the coeditor of Economics of Governance and is an editorial board member of Public Choice. He has held visiting appointments at Stanford and Carnegie Mellon and is past chair of the Department of Economics, UCI, and director, Focused Research Program in Public Choice. John G. Matsusaka is a professor in the Marshall School of Business and Law School at USC and president of the Initiative and Referendum Institute. Matsusaka received his PhD in economics from the University of Chicago and has held visiting appointments at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University; University of California, Los Angeles; California Institute of Technology; and the University of Chicago. His research focuses on the financing, governance, and organization of corporations and governments. He has published numerous scholarly articles, has served as a consultant for the White House Council of Economic Advisors, and is the author of the recently published book For the Many or the Few: The Initiative, Public Policy, and American Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 2004). Anthony McGann of the University of California-Irvine is the author of The Logic of Democracy, published by the University of Michigan Press, and has published widely on parties and democratic decision making. McGann is an affiliated faculty member of U'Cl's Center for the Study of Democracy. Stephen P. Nicholson is the author of Voting the Agenda, published by Princeton University Press (2005). In his book, Nicholson puts forward the argument that ballot propositions may set the electoral agenda in candidate races. Currently, he is researching the role of group stereotypes in voting on ballot propositions. In addition to studying direct democracy, his research focuses on divided government, approval of governmental institutions, and Latino political behavior. Nicholson is the recipient of the 2006 Emerging Scholar Award given by the American Political Science Association's organized section on Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior. Recently, he became a founding member of the political science program at the University of California, Merced. Nicholson's research has been published in AmericanJournal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, BritishJournal of Political Science, and Political Research Quarterly.

11 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii Daniel A. Smith is the coauthor of Educated by Initiative: The Effects of Direct Democracy on Citizens and Political Organizations in the American States, published by the University of Michigan Press (2004). He has published more than two dozen scholarly articles on the politics, processes, and campaign financing of ballot initiatives, as well as on the workings of American political parties and interest groups. He has also written several articles examining Ghanaian politics. His book Tax Crusaders and the Politics of Direct Democracy (Routledge, 1998) examined the financial backing and the populist-sounding rhetoric of three antitax ballot initiatives-proposition 13 in California (1978), Proposition 2 1/2 in Massachusetts (1980), and Amendment 1 in Colorado (1992)-that did much to transform the ideological debates over state and market in the 1970s and 1980s. Professor Smith serves on the board of directors of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C., and is a senior research fellow at the Initiative and Referendum Institute. Caroline Tolbert is a leading scholar on the educative effects of the initiative. She is the coauthor of Educated by Initiative: The Effects of Direct Democracy on Citizens and Political Organizations in the American States (2004), published by the University of Michigan Press, and the coeditor of Citizens as Legislators. She is also the coauthor of Virtual Inequality: Beyond the DigitalDivide(Georgetown University Press, 2003). She serves on the editorial board of StatePolitics and Policy Quarterly and is a member of the board of scholars of the Initiative and Referendum Institute. She is the recipient of national grants from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Smith Richardson Foundation.

12 Preface At each election, dozens of proposals are put directly to voters by the process of direct democracy. In November 2006 alone there were over 200 proposals on the ballot ranging in topic from the legality of gay marriage to stem cell research, from eminent domain to the regulation of tobacco smoking. Past years have seen similarly controversial issues put to voters; abortion law, immigrant rights, drug use, animal rights, and "official English" language policy have all appeared on ballots. Critics are quick to stress the downside of a process that allows so many issues to be voted on directly. Over and above the number of proposalsthe dozens of policy changes proposed in each election-there may also be proposals that seek to regulate government and politics directly. Alongside hot-button issues of morality, voters may also be asked to vote on questions of term limits, tax and expenditure limits, campaign finance laws, and the regulation of primaries. All of these proposals have appeared on ballots and all sought to directly regulate the state's political and constitutional structure. As a consequence both of the number of the proposals and also of their content, critics argue that direct democracy is just too disruptive of "normal" politics and political life, either because there are simply so many policies introduced this way or because the proposals often seek to regulate government itself. Critics therefore argue that direct democracy is bad for representative democracy and, in a wider sense, for democracy itself. To date, however, there has been little or no systematic assessment of the claim that direct democracy is bad for the workings of representative democracy. Criticism of the initiative, the referendum, and the recall, which together comprise the processes of direct democracy, is often very vocal. But that criticism is often grounded in a few specific examples that may well be taken out of context or are exceptional. This volume marks the first attempt to examine systematically the impact of direct democracy on representative democracy. It studies how direct democracy affects the ways in which representative democracy works or disrupts it. The United States provides an ideal testing ground for this study because roughly half the states have some form of direct

13 xvi PREFACE democracy and half do not. We can therefore compare the workings of representative democracy across states both with and without direct democracy. The volume comprises a series of chapters that examine the impact of direct democracy on the different elements of representative democracy. Each chapter in the volume is written by a leading scholar in the field, and the chapters themselves concern specific topics that are tied to the overall theme of the volume.

14 Acknowledgments The editors would like to thank the Center for the Study of Democracy at DC Irvine and in particular, Russell Dalton for the financial support and encouragement that made the original conference on this topic possible. We would also like to thank John Matsusaka and the Initiative and Referendum Institute for the material presented in the Appendices. We would also like to thank Reuben Kline for help in preparing the index and the editors and copy editors at Macmillan for their hard work in making the book a finished product.