Initiative and Referendum

Direct Democracy: A Global Comparative Study on Electoral Initiative and Referendum Mechanisms

Strategic Timing of Ballot Initiatives: Evidence from Wisconsin School Referenda

One important consideration when studying direct democracy is the rules on agenda establishment. In their seminal series of articles, Romer and Rosenthal (1978, 1979) identified the ability of a budget maximizing monopolist referendum agenda-setter to extract a greater amount of expenditure than desired by the median voter. While in Romer and Rosenthal’s models, the agenda setter exercised cont...

Predicting the Brexit outcome using singular spectrum analysis

In a referendum conducted in the United Kingdom (UK) on June 23, 2016, $51.6\%$ of the participants voted to leave the European Union (EU). The outcome of this referendum had major policy and financial impact for both UK and EU, and was seen as a surprise because the predictions consistently indicate that the ``Remain'''' would get a majority. In this paper, we investigate whether the outcome o...

The eclipse of legislatures: Direct democracy in the 21st century

The eclipse of legislatures: Direct democracy in the 21st century JOHN G. MATSUSAKA Marshall School of Business and Law School, University of Southern California, Los Angeles CA 90089-1427 USA Abstract. Demographic, political, and technological trends are fueling an unprecedented growth in direct democracy worldwide. If the trends continue, direct democracy threatens to eclipse legislatures in ...

Election Forensics and the 2004 Venezuelan Presidential Recall Referendum as a Case Study

A referendum to recall President Hugo Chávez was held in Venezuela in August of 2004. In the referendum, voters were to vote YES if they wished to recall the President and NO if they wanted him to continue in office. The official results were 59% NO and 41% YES. Even though the election was monitored by various international groups including the Organization of American States and the Carter Ce...