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Justifications and Citizen Competence in Direct Democracy: A Multilevel Analysis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 May 2016

Céline Colombo
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Abstract

The criticism that ordinary voters lack the necessary competence to make policy decisions persists despite the growth, popularity and implementation of direct democratic instruments throughout the democratic world. This article presents a novel measure of voters’ levels of justification as a possible, policy-specific, conceptualization of citizen competence in direct democracy. Using a unique dataset based on thirty-four ballot decisions in Switzerland, the study analyses the levels and correlates of citizen competence. The main findings are, first, that most voters do understand arguments about policies. Secondly, the political context as well as individual resources are important in determining voters’ competence. Finally, with regard to individual resources, motivation is strongly associated with justification levels, while the effect of ability is smaller than expected.

Type
Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 48 , Issue 3 , July 2018 , pp. 787 - 806
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2016 

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Footnotes

*

Department of Political Science, University of Zurich (email: [email protected]). I am grateful to Hanspeter Kriesi, Alexander Trechsel, Thomas Milic, Marco Steenbergen, Nan Zhang, Thomas Widmer, Hannes Kröger and Igor Skulkin for their valuable comments and support. In particular, I thank Mathias Birrer for his invaluable help with data coding and his many inputs. Supplementary materials available at http://dx.doi.org/doi: 10.1017/S0007123416000090 and replication data available at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/BJPolS.

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Supplementary material: Link

Colombo Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/MR8BVX
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