Miscellaneous
Does direct democracy increase communicative responsiveness? A field experiment with Swiss politicians Anouk Lloren First Published March 27, 2017, Sage, Research and Politics Article Information Volume: 4 issue: 1, Article first published online: March 27, 2017;Issue published: January 1, 2017 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/2053168017700738 Anouk Llorenanouk.lloren@gmail.com Swiss National Science Foundation, Bern, Switzerland This article was distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). Abstract Many argue that direct democracy improves the quality of democracy. In particular, many scholars claim that it increases the representation of the public’s preferences by fostering communicative responsiveness between politicians and citizens. While studies have come to mixed conclusions about the effect of direct democracy on policy outcomes, little is known about how direct democratic processes affect politicians’ responsiveness. Using a field experiment, this study examines whether direct democracy increases the responsiveness of Swiss state legislators to citizen-initiated contacts on policy concerns. Contrary to popular belief, our results show that direct democracy does not enhance politicians’ responsiveness to policy requests.