Direct Democracy in Context: How Direct-Democratic Institutions Interact with Representative Democracy

Research on direct democracy is often entirely sub-national research focusing on a single country or cross-national with limited variance in direct democratic institutions. That has consequences for the scope and opportunity to understand and learn about direct democratic institutions, in particular how they interact with representative democracy. In this paper we use a subnational cross-country comparative perspective to delve deeper into the relationship between direct democracy and individual satisfaction with democracy. To that end we propose a measure of direct democratic institutions for 101 sub-national units that allows to measure the extent of these institutions across various contexts. Comparing the subnational units of the United States, Switzerland, Germany and Austria, we do not find a general relationship between direct democratic institutions and democratic satisfaction. However, we find that direct democracy has the potential to decrease the difference between electoral winners and losers, whereby this mechanism can be observed across different representative systems.