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Popular Referendum and Electoral Accountability

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 October 2016

Patrick Le Bihan
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Abstract

This paper studies how citizen-initiated referenda affect the decision-making of elected representatives. In the absence of direct democracy, elected officials who do not share the preferences of voters may enact their preferred policies even at the cost of decreasing the likelihood of reelection. Direct democracy diminishes the policy benefits of doing that, as voters may now overturn some of the policy decisions. Hence, elected officials are induced to implement the policies preferred by the voters not only on those issues that are subject to a possible citizen-initiated referendum, but also on those that are not. This result holds even when the voters’ information about their true interests is limited. Moreover, whereas in a representative democracy, being more informed may undermine voters’ ability to control public officials, the possibility of citizen-initiated referenda means that additional information improves voter control, including on issues that may be outside the direct democracy domain.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 6 , Issue 4 , October 2018 , pp. 715 - 731
Copyright
© The European Political Science Association 2016 

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Footnotes

*

Patrick Le Bihan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, Sciences Po, Centre de recherches politiques (CEVIPOF), CNRS, 75007 Paris ([email protected]). The author thanks Eric Dickson, Wioletta Dziuda, Jean-Guillaume Forand, Cathy Hafer, Simon Hug, Roger Myerson, Howard Rosenthal, Mike Ting and seminar audiences at the IAST, the LSE, NYU, the University of Chicago, and UCSD for helpful comments and suggestions. The author is especially grateful to Dimitri Landa for his support with this project. Support through ANR-Labex IAST is gratefully acknowledged. To view supplementary material for this article, please visit http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2016.41

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