We study popular initiatives as an important element of direct democracy. The initiative process is modelled as a sequential game under uncertainty: petitioners collect signatures to qualify the initiative and elicit information about the initiative's winning probability. Politicians decide...

This paper analyzes a recent ballot in which two virtually identical popular initiatives, both demanding a decrease in the legal age of retirement in Switzerland, led to differences in approval rates of nearly seven percentage points. Based on this unique natural experiment, the existence of...

In this paper, I challenge the notion that women prefer larger governments than men which is why extending the franchise to women has led to an increase in government spending in many industrialized countries. I estimate the average treatment effect of being female on support for government...

We use a model of self-centered inequality aversion suggested by Fehr and Schmidt (1999) to study voting on redistribution. We theoretically identify two classes of conditions when an empirically plausible amount of fairness preferences induces redistribution through referenda. We test the...

This paper investigates whether petition signing campaigns for popular initiatives constitute a partisan campaigning instrument by revealing potentially relevant information to the signer which increases the benefit from voting or reduces its cost. The analysis is based on the complete sample of...