Improving Representation? the Effects of Direct Involvement Structures On Government Responsiveness

Intensified international cooperation and the delegation of decisions, as well as a diversified citizenry have posed additional challenges to, and constraints on, current democratic governments. Due to these constraints, decision-making becomes ever more difficult, and as a result government policies may become less responsive to citizens. However, research concerning the extent to which democracies are responsive has focused mostly on the United States. In Europe, few studies have tried to measure responsiveness, let alone investigated the conditions under which responsiveness may improve or deter. This paper focuses on government responsiveness in a European context. In particular, it discusses the impact of direct democratic processes on responsiveness. From a normative point of view, it could be argued that relocating the decision-making process from governments to citizens would automatically improve responsiveness, since imperfect mechanisms of representation can be bypassed. From an empirical point of view, however, responsiveness in countries with more direct-decision-making opportunities may be reduced due to watered-down compromises that usually take a long time to pass the popular veto. Conditioning the relation between people’s policy preferences and policy output on institutions of direct democracy, and using time-series cross-sectional data, this paper aims at empirically testing these two rivaling hypotheses.