Direct Democracy and Equality in European Democracies: Why Context Matters

Direct democracy is on the rise in many European countries. Politicians as well as political scientists hope that including citizens directly in political decision-making will increase support for democracy. Nevertheless, the outputs of those votes have only been analyzed to a very limited extend. In our article, we focus on the impact of direct democratic votes on different dimensions of equality in European democracies between 1990 and 2015. Do national referenda more often foster or hinder equality? Previous analyses revealed different answers to this question depending on the country group under investigation. Obviously, context matters. But what exactly does account for these differences? In multi-level regressions, we analyze the influence of country-level variables such as the level of socioeconomic equality, the age of democracy, and the political system, as well as the vote-specific context, for example who initiated bottom-up votes and if the government recommended voting for or against the proposal, on equality-outputs of direct democracy. Our results offer important insights about the overall implications of direct democracy for equality and the context factors that are influential in this regard.