This paper explores the benefits and costs of the voter initiative, a direct democracy device that allows voters to make policy decisions rather than their elected representatives. Previous research suggests that by introducing competition into the proposal-making process, the initiative leads...

This note identifies problems with a methodology that has been used to test whether policy is more or less responsive to public opinion in states with voter initiatives. The methodology is to regress a policy variable on a measure of constituent preferences, and compare the coefficients for...

This paper studies how investors responded when Chinese regulators required a group of large, publicly traded companies to divest their non-core hotel and real estate assets in 2010. The quasi-experiment allows direct estimates of the effect of diversification on value that are free from common...

The initiative and referendum were intended to curtail the power of organized interest groups, yet business groups account for more spending on ballot measures than any other group by far. Does this mean that direct democracy has become a tool for corporations to buy favorable legislation? This...

This paper estimates to what extent proxy advice allows funds to vote as if they were informed. A fund’s vote is classified as “informed“ if the fund accessed the company’s proxy statement from the SEC’s Edgar website prior to voting. A fund’s proxy advisor, if any, is identified...

This paper investigates how often and under what conditions legislators vote in accordance with constituent opinion. The main innovation is to measure constituent opinion using referendum election returns. In a sample of 3,983 roll-call votes on 31 laws in nine states, I find that legislator...

It is common in research on representation to estimate a variable called “responsiveness,” the correlation between policy outcomes and public opinion. Responsiveness so measured is a necessary feature of representation, but theoretical research has shown that there is no logical basis for...

This paper presents evidence from parallel field experiments in China, Germany, and the United States. We contacted the mayor’s office in over 6,000 cities asking for information about procedures for starting a new business. Chinese and German cities responded to 36-37 percent requests;...

In many Swiss cantons, new government programs must be approved by a referendum of citizens before money can be spent. Referendums seem like a natural way to address citizen-legislator agency problems, yet statistical evidence on how referendums affect spending decisions is almost nonexistent....

Do voters see democracy entirely as a game of self-interest in which one person’s gain is another’s loss, or do they also view it as a search for the common good, as some democracy theorists have long conjectured? Existing empirical research that assumes entirely private interests cannot...