Much Ado About (Virtually) Nothing? Referendums as a Less-Than Perfect Means of Aligning Elite and Voters in the Case of Switzerland, 1977-2018

Congruence of political elite actions and the preferences of the electorate is constitutive for democracy. Elections are crucial in this respect since they foster alignment between the both, through sanctioning divergence of elite action ex post. An even closer alignment might be achieved by an additional means of citizen participation, namely, referendums. Under a logic of sanctioning then, elite divergence from citizens’ preferences is punished even ex ante, via reputation costs inflicted on parts of the elite for even trying to diverge from the wishes of a majority of voters. Consequently, a large literature deals with the advantages of direct democratic institutions and whether such institutions lead to policies more in line with citizens’ preferences. Instances of elite-voter incongruence are then typically studied by comparing attitudes of citizens with positions of political parties as expressed in surveys or by experts. In this paper, we present an alternative way to look at referendums as a means for fostering elite-voter congruence. Arguing that representatives anticipate reputation costs inflicted on them by a referendum and adapt their policy proposals accordingly beforehand, we analyze the question whether direct democratic institutions indeed lead to policies that more closely reflect citizens’ preferences or whether decisions by representatives alone would have led to the same policy outcomes anyway. So we inquire into the immediate “added value” of direct democracy in terms of aligning policy more closely with the preferences of (a majority of) citizens than is the case under representative democracy proper. The point with referendums would then be their existence as an institution rather than their actual usage. However, referendums have been held. So the above logic does not always hold empirically. This is why we also address the “added cost” of direct democracy, an issue that has received much less attention in the literature than the one of (gross) gains. These costs particularly concern variation in levels of participation in elections vs. referendums as a source of majorities at odds with each other over policy, even if indirectly. The case of Switzerland grants the unique opportunity to explore the role referendums play as regards the relationship between citizens’ preferences as expressed at the ballot and elite actions as measured by legislators’ votes on the issues at stake in referendums. We employ a novel dataset covering all 348 Swiss national-level popular initiatives and referendums in the 40-year period 1977-2018 in order to gauge the degree to which decisions of representatives match the position of voters as expressed in referendum majorities, but also margins of majorities. We coded the votes and issues covered in referendums along the full set of official booklets published by Swiss authorities (the Abstimmungsbuchlein) in this period. The paper contributes to the literature on the links between elite and voters, as encapsulated in the notion of direct democracy, from a theoretical, utilitarian angle. It is also the first study to address this issue with the help of an encompassing dataset.