Structured Loss in Direct Democracy: How Identity-Based Defeats Shape Trust and Democratic Support

Direct democracy is often promoted as a remedy for democratic recession, promising greater responsiveness through policy alignment and direct citizen involvement. Yet popular votes generate asymmetric democratic experiences: winners gain trust and satisfaction, while losers do not. Importantly, losses in direct democracy are not equivalent. Because issues are isolated rather than bundled, defeats become more salient and less compensable. Repeated votes on salient and identity-relevant issues can subject certain groups to recurring defeats, reinforcing cleavages and creating cumulative patterns of exclusion, where some citizens rarely see their worldview prevail in consequential political decisions. These identity-relevant losses may carry downstream effects. When groups consistently lose on issues that activate core commitments, the experience signals limited influence and weak prospects for future success. Over time, such patterned exclusion can erode institutional trust, external efficacy, and even confidence in fellow citizens as legitimate decision-makers—an especially consequential outcome in direct democracy, where citizens themselves constitute the decision-making authority. Existing research documents winner-loser gaps, but often treats losses as interchangeable and focuses narrowly on institutional trust and legitimacy. What remains unclear is how the structure of losses, specifically, identity-based and recurrent defeats, shapes both institutional and social dimensions of democratic support. This project addresses this gap by theorizing and empirically testing when and how identity-based losses in direct democracy erode trust and efficacy. It combines two complementary strategies. First, I use the Swiss Household Panel (1999–2024) to identify cleavage-aligned groups and estimate individuals’ ideological positions with an item response theory (IRT) model. By matching these latent ideological profiles to historical referendum outcomes, I construct a structural loss score capturing how often respondents’ cleavage-consistent positions were on the losing side of salient popular votes. Within-person models then assess whether accumulated structural losses predict declines in trust, satisfaction with democracy, and external efficacy, and whether effects intensify with issue salience. Second, I field a survey experiment on a representative Swiss sample (N≈1,500), manipulating exposure to personalized ledgers of repeated losses on socio-cultural and economic dimensions. Tailoring treatments to respondents' ideological positions isolates whether it is repeated losing per se or losing on identity-relevant issues that drives declines in democratic support. Together, these approaches address a core question of the workshop: when do popular vote processes foster cohesion, and when do they deepen exclusion and distrust? The findings aim to inform normative and institutional debates on the design and use of referendums and initiatives, highlighting the risks of structural exclusion in systems that rely on direct democratic decision-making.