Where Does Direct Democracy Engage Citizens? Interactions Between Local Referendums, Spatial Inequality, and Electoral Turnout

The potential mobilizing effect of direct democracy on citizens is a key point of contention in the debate on direct democracy’s benefits to representative democratic systems. However, evidence that referendums increase citizens’ political participation is mixed and research has only recently started to examine which citizens tend to be mobilized. In this paper, I further develop this research strand by adding the crucial question where i.e. in which spatial context citizens are mobilized. Based on the resource model of political participation, I assume that the share of socially disadvantaged citizens in a municipality is a crucial factor for the level of local political participation. Analyzing longitudinal data on local referendums, municipal elections, and socioeconomic structure in German municipalities between 1995 and 2016, first I scrutinize how the characteristics of local referendums differ across municipalities paying special attention to the influence of spatial social inequality. Then, I examine the differential effect of local referendums on the relationship between spatial social inequality and turnout in municipal elections. The analysis provides deeper insights to the moderating effect of referendums on inequalities in electoral turnout by adding a spatial perspective to existing research and contributes to our understanding of the interplay between direct and representative democracy.