Choosing the Right Policy: A Comparison of National Level Referendums in Europe

Several studies made an attempt to explain why referendums are conducted. So far, attention focused mostly on the initiator’s reasons to organize the referendum, with emphasis on the institutional side. Much less effort, which usually took the form of single case studies, has been put into understanding why specific policies are subjected to popular vote. To address this gap in the literature, our paper aims to explain why countries used referendums on particular policies, at a given moment in time. To this end, we analyse the effect of determinants such as the ideology of the government, experience with democracy in the country and external shocks around referendums on the policy chosen for referendum. We also control for contagion effect and experience with direct democracy in the country. This paper uses as dependent variable a policy-based typology that differentiates between 12 policy fields. Our comparative analysis draws on an original dataset of 620 nation-wide referendums held in Europe between 1793 and 2017. We use a mixed-method approach in which the quantitative analysis is used to reveal patterns and trajectories across countries, while a qualitative case study analysis on four referendums is used to explain the observed patterns.