A cross-national comparative study of the policy
effects of referendums
∗
Karin Gilland Lutz
†
and Simon Hug
‡
CIS, IPZ, Universit¨at Z¨urich
Paper prepared for presentation at the
Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association
Philadelphia, August 31 - September 3, 2006
August 16, 2006
Abstract
With the adoption of new constitutions in Eastern and Central Europe
containing numerous provisions allowing for referendums, cross-national
comparative work on the policy effects of referendums across the Euro-
pean continent have become possible. This allows us to close an important
gap in the literature on referendums, namely to assess the consequences of
these institutions at the national level. More precisely, we wish to assess
whether the well-documented policy effects at the subnational level (e.g.,
in the United States or Switzerland) carry over to the national level. Some
of these subnational studies support the theoretically derived implication
that the possibility of referendums leads to policies more closely reflecting
the voters’ wishes. The present paper provides empirical tests of this, but
contrary to other empirical studies so far, proposes a comparative analysis
at the national level. For several policies in the domain of labor regulation
we show that the presence of institutions allowing for referendums reduces
the difference between policy outcomes and the voters’ wishes as assessed
in surveys. We carry out these tests on the basis of several datasets cov-
ering a range of mainly Western countries, and rely on a diverse set of
methodologies to assess policy outcomes.
∗
The financial support of the Swiss National Science Foundation (Grant No. 100012-
108179) is gratefully acknowledged.
†
Institut f¨
ur Politikwissenschaft; Universit¨at Z¨
urich; Hirschengraben 56; 8001 Z¨
urich;
Switzerland; phone +41 (0)44 634 50 28; fax: +41 (0)44 634 50 98; email: gilland-
## email not listed ##
‡
Institut f¨
ur Politikwissenschaft; Universit¨at Z¨
urich; Hirschengraben 56; 8001 Z¨
urich;
Switzerland; phone +41 (0)44 634 50 90/1; fax:
+41 (0)44 634 50 98; email:
si-
mon.## email not listed ##
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