期刊
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL ECONOMY
卷 58, 期 -, 页码 82-101出版社
ELSEVIER SCIENCE INC
DOI: 10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2018.10.004
关键词
Voting behavior; Proposition complexity; Direct democracy; Status quo bias; Heckman probit model
资金
- German National Science Foundation (DFG) through Collaborative Research Center at the University of Mannheim [884]
- Young Scholar Fund at the University of Konstanz
One concern about direct democracy is that citizens may not be sufficiently competent to decide about complex policies. This may lead to exaggerated conservatism in the voting decision (status quo bias). To investigate how complexity affects individual voting behavior, we develop a novel measure of proposition complexity (using official pre-referendum booklets) and combine it with post-referendum survey data from Switzerland. Using Heckman selection estimations to account for endogenous variation in participation rates, we find that an increase in proposition complexity from the 10th to the 90th percentile would decrease voted approval by 5.6 ppts, which is often decisive: an additional 12% of the propositions in our sample would be rejected.
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