The Use of Referendums in Latin America: Good or Bad Intentions?

Analyses on direct democratic mechanisms (MDD) provide contradictory results when it comes to judge their effects on modern representative democracy. On the one hand, some researchers associate MDDs with the deepening of democracy, others however, highlight problems of political manipulation and the potential concentration of power in the hands of individual actors. Contributing to this discussion, we investigate the motivations of political actors to call for these mechanisms in different political contexts. To do so we distinguish between i) the actor constellation and the position of the agenda setter within it (dominant, in competition, or excluded), and ii) the political function of the mechanism (institutional vs. public policy change). We propose that referendums initiated by non-veto players or aimed at changing public policies are more likely to happen in democratic contexts while, referendums initiated in the context of a single veto player or aimed towards institutional change are more likely to happen in less democratic contexts. We test these arguments building on a newly compiled data set of MDDs in 18 Latin American countries covering a period from 1900-2017.