Access to Power and Support for Direct Democracy – Evidence from Europe

Direct democracy is increasingly popular among citizens, but who supports participatory procedures, and why? Many studies on procedural preferences are based on the idea that the support for referendums and initiatives reflects citizens’ normative beliefs on how democracy should work. However, scholars increasingly point to evidence that individual strategic calculations also play a role. This paper adds to the canon and argues that voters self-interestedly align their procedural preferences with their perception of how likely politics will be responsive to them. In a representative democracy, parties’ access to power is decisive for the influence of their voters in the political arena. I therefore expect voters’ support for direct democracy to depend on the extent to which their preferred party has access to power. A statistical analysis of European Social Survey data from 20 European democracies provides partial support for my argument. While small differences in the voters’ access to power do not correlate with the support for direct democracy, the study shows that, independent of their ideological stances, voters of the least powerful (challenger) parties diverge significantly in their preferences from those of more powerful parties. The study therefore provides further evidence that citizens’ procedural preferences also follow an instrumental logic.