Unequal responsiveness and direct democracy

Recent studies of the U.S. and European countries find that policy responsiveness is strongly skewed toward the affluent and well-educated. The introduction of direct democracy has been proposed as a solution to this problem. To explore whether this could lead to greater political equality, this paper studies policy responsiveness in Switzerland—the country with the strongest direct democratic institutions in the world. The analysis is based on an original dataset linking public opinion to policy, with 399 survey questions asked between 1972 and 2017. Extending the approach pioneered by Gilens (2012), I show that direct democratic agenda-setting in Switzerland is more egalitarian than representative democratic agenda-setting and that—likely due to referenda—the status-quo bias favors all income and education groups equally. However, despite its unique direct democratic institutions, also in Switzerland, policy outcomes are skewed toward the preferences of citizens with high levels of income and education.