Designing (Out) Democracy: Legal design choices of citizen-initiated popular vote processes and how they affect their use

Bottom-up direct democratic instruments such as citizen initiatives and veto initiatives are often described as mechanisms that expand citizen influence (Papadopoulos, 1995, Altman 2018). In practice, however, their use varies widely (Altman 2010). Out of 27 countries globally which have a citizens’ initiative, 13 countries have never seen a popular vote on a citizens’ initiative. This paper argues that the frequency of use is not a simple function of public demand. Instead, it reflects the underlying architecture of legal frameworks that govern citizen access to political power. Far from neutral, these frameworks are active instruments of political design, they either invite or inhibit participation through configurations of thresholds, time constraints, and other procedural hurdles. In this sense, citizens' participation is not only enabled by law; it is filtered, shaped, and sometimes even, deliberately contained by it. The analysis relies on a new panel dataset covering 22 bottom-up processes in 15 countries from 1980 to 2023. The dataset captures annual changes in core design elements, including signature thresholds, collection periods, quorum rules, and the opportunities for counterproposals. Existing studies tend to treat legal design as a fixed national trait (Altman, 2010; Breuer, 2011; Moeckli et al., 2025); in contrast, this research captures how legal configurations evolve over time, how reforms recalibrate accessibility, and how these shifts correlate with patterns of initiative use. A central contribution is the systematic inclusion of registered initiative attempts, not only those that reached a vote. Most of these data come from the LIDD project (Moeckli, 2025), which collected official counts of initiative registrations directly from electoral authorities. This data was supplemented with historical coding and direct contact with registration bodies. The paper investigates two outcomes: the number of initiative proposals registered per year, and the number of proposals that ultimately result in a popular vote. Modelling these two stages separately makes it possible to distinguish between rules that discourage citizens from initiating proposals and that impede proposals later in the process. A zero-inflated negative binomial model is used to account for the high number of years in which no initiatives occur. Several initial results stand out. Requirements that affect the likelihood of success (quorum requirements) are strongly and consistently associated with lower use. These rules appear to discourage citizens from initiating proposals, not only from winning them. By contrast, signature thresholds have limited explanatory power in this cross-national sample. Time available for collecting signatures shows a clear effect: longer periods are associated with more initiative registrations. Counterproposal provisions are also linked to lower initiative votes, which suggests that these mechanisms may reduce the need for citizens to initiate proposals by encouraging earlier responses from political elites. Legal reforms show short-term increases in activity, indicating that institutional change can temporarily stimulate use. The paper shows that formal availability of citizen-initiated instruments is not sufficient for meaningful use, and ties in with the greater question of why, and when, these processes support or undermine democracy.