The aim of this study was to determine whether referendums affect stock price risks and returns, using an event study approach. Daily end period data for the Swiss stock market index, the STOXX European market index, and the Swiss/US exchange rate running from the beginning of 2004 to June 2021,...

The popularity of staging Olympic Games has dropped in democratic countries as a series of failed referenda and withdrawn bids as well as protests against mega sport events have shown in recent years. Nevertheless, the there still are democratically elected office-holders willing to become...

North Macedonia and Greece resolved the 27-year country name dispute and removed the main hurdle for North Macedonia to start the accession processes towards the EU and NATO. The paper analyzes the stock market movements around several events related to the name issue resolution to uncover...

In 2010, Georgians voted on a proposed constitutional amendment that would have increased motor vehicle licensing fees by USD 10 with the proceeds dedicated to maintaining and expanding the state's trauma care centers. This paper examines voter support for the referendum across counties and...

We test whether the proactive use of instruments of direct democracy by voters can help to explain fiscal sustainability of 25 Swiss cantons. Using data of all cantonal popular votes since 1977, our results show that the fiscal reaction of cantonal governments to an increase in the debt to GDP...

Since the Council of Europe’s creation in 1950, the share of member states with direct democratic instruments has leaped from 40% to 87% in 2022. This article asks whether the ECHR can accommodate these instruments under Article 3 of Protocol 1, the primary provision available for such...

Purpose - This paper aims to examine the secessionist orientation of Kurdistan Region's paradiplomacy in the context of two main variables: the internal structural variables in Iraq after 2003 and the nationalism variable. Design/methodology/approach - This study relies on the theory of...

By voting to leave the European Union (EU) in 2016, the United Kingdom (UK) set off a long period of uncertainty and signalled its support for the Leave campaigns, which centred around restricting migration. This paper researches how this decision affected EU-UK migration patterns. We exploit...

The relationship between democracy and regulation is contested. At the federal level, in the absence of a national initiative of referendum process, or democratic control over regulators themselves, we find some democratic accountability in other ways—like the indirect election of the...

We leverage a unique dataset at the municipality level in Italy to examine the factors that drive support for two separate referendum campaigns - one on the decriminalization of cannabis cultivation and the other on physician-assisted suicide. Using machine learning techniques, we identify key...

The project, ”Referendum Poll System,” aims to enforce referendums and enable people to express their opin- ions directly, re-engaging them with politics and democracy. The current representative democracy fails to provide direct participation of people in the decision-making process. Online...

Subnational groups employ a variety of strategies to contest governments. While democratic states offer a broader array of accessible options, autocratic regimes are more difficult to contest via conventional means. Why do subnational groups stage sovereignty referendums across regime types? Our...

Subnational groups employ a variety of strategies to contest governments. While democratic states offer a broader array of accessible options, autocratic regimes are more difficult to contest via conventional means. Why do subnational groups stage sovereignty referendums across regime types? Our...

The popularity of staging Olympic Games has dropped in democratic countries as a series of failed referenda and withdrawn bids as well as protests against mega sport events have shown in recent years. Nevertheless, the there still are democratically elected office-holders willing to become...

Externalities from the production and consumption of meat could be addressed by a meat tax. In a referendum choice experiment with 3,169 participants, we elicited support for a meat tax varying the following characteristics: tax level, justification of the tax, degree of differentiation and...

Our paper analyzes historical data for New York State on the percentagee of school budget proposals that are defeated each year and panel data that we have collected on budget vote success for indvidual school districts in the state. We find that changes in state aid matter, but not as much as...

Does self-governance, a hallmark of democratic societies, foster or erode norms of generalized cooperation? Does this effect persist, and if so, why? I investigate these questions using a natural experiment in Switzerland. In the middle-ages, the absence of an heir resulted in the extinction of...

Democratic direct voting on issues (in the form of referenda) suffers from the tyranny of the majority as well as potentially supporting extremist and populist positions. We state 4 fair voting principles for issue based voting, and show that current direct voting systems are not consistent with...

In this paper we examine three forms of regret in relation to the UKâ s hugely significant referendum on EU membership that was held in June 2016. These are, (i) whether leave voters at the referendum subsequently regretted their choice (in the light of the result), (ii) whether non-voters...

We study euro area investors' portfolio adjustment since the Brexit referendum in terms of securities issued in the UK or denominated in pound sterling, in the context of heightened policy uncertainty surrounding the exit process of the UK from the EU. Our sector-level analysis "looks-through"...

In most real-life binary referendums, there are several alternatives that potentially can challenge the status quo alternative. Depending on which alternative that is selected, the voters are also differently likely to caste their vote on it. The fact that there are several potential challenger...

Why has geographical political polarisation increased in recent times? In a simple model, we show that one catalyst is a social learning mechanism whereby policy preferences become more homogeneous within geographical units, yet increasingly heterogeneous between units over time as voters become...

Does self-governance, a hallmark of democratic societies, foster or erode norms of generalized cooperation? Does this effect persist, and if so, why? I investigate these questions using a natural experiment in Switzerland. In the middle-ages, the absence of an heir resulted in the extinction of...

In this paper, we analyze several local referendums on land development and land-use regulation in the City of Erlangen (Germany) in the period between 2011 and 2018. To identify the positive influence of the travel distance on approval for the development of land, we employ a two-way...

Adopting the group turnout model of Herrera and Mattozzi, J. Eur. Econ. Assoc. 2010, 8, 838–871, we investigate direct democracy with supermajority rule and different preference intensities for two sides of a referendum: Reform versus status quo. Two parties spend money and effort to mobilize...

We introduce a democratic procedure with voting-based proposals called "Pendular Voting". It works as follows: An agenda-setter chooses a proposal meant to replace a given status quo. In the first stage, a random sample of the population votes on the proposal. The result is made public, which...

In 2010, Georgians voted on a proposed constitutional amendment that would have increased motor vehicle licensing fees by USD 10 with the proceeds dedicated to maintaining and expanding the state's trauma care centers. This paper examines voter support for the referendum across counties and...

In September 2020 Italy held a constitutional referendum. On the same election days, many municipalities and some regions held municipal and regional elections. We exploit this unique occasion, caused by the unexpected Covid-19 crisis, to obtain a causal estimate of the effects of the overlap of...

Nowadays, several social movements asking for direct participation of citizens in the decision-making process are emerging in western democracies. These groups argue that traditional representative systems fail to adequately represent the will of the majority (often defined as “people” by...

I investigate why the United States did not adopt European style health insurance in the 1910s by examining voting determinants on the 1918 referendum on state-provided health insurance in California. I find that although the persuasiveness of interest groups, especially doctors, was an...

On February 20, 2015 Irish Premier Enda Kenny confirmed that a “yes-no” referendum on same sex marriage would be held on May 22 of the same year. A yes vote would legalise same sex marriage in Ireland. As the Irish premier put it, the vote was about “tolerance, respect and sensitivity.”...

How well does the pivotal-voter model explain voter participation in small-scale elections? This paper explores this question using data from Texas liquor referenda. It first structurally estimates the parameters of a pivotal-voter model using the Texas data. It then uses the estimates to...

This paper uses data from Texas liquor referenda to explore a new approach to understanding voter turnout, inspired by the theoretical work of Harsanyi (1980) and Feddersen and Sandroni (2001). It presents a model based on this approach and structurally estimates it using the referendum data. It...

How did expectations of the outcome of the United Kingdom's (UK) referendum on European Union (EU) membership in 2016 affect prices in financial markets? We study this using high frequency data from betting and financial markets. We find that a one percentage point increase in the probability of...

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...

This paper proposes a simple scheme designed to elicit and reward intensity of preferences in referenda: voters faced with a number of binary proposals are given one regular vote for each proposal plus an additional number of bonus votes to cast as desired. Decisions are taken according to the...

This paper analyses the impact that the Brexit referendum and Brexit process has had on migration policies and trends in the UK and in Europe, as well as the impact on EU citizens in the UK. After an introduction covering the interaction of Brexit and immigration, the paper describes the issues...

Using data of Swiss referenda from 1981 to 1999, this paper presents new empirical results which allow us to discriminate better between the decision and mobilisation hypotheses of electoral participation. First, theoretical considerations which lead to these hypotheses are presented as well as...

The fiscal commons problem is one of the most prominent explanations of excessive spending and indebtedness in political economics. The more fragmented a government, the higher its spending, deficits and debt. In this paper we investigate to what extent this problem can be mitigated by different...

Our paper analyzes historical data for New York State on the percentage of school board budget proposals that are defeated each year and panel data that we collected for individual school districts in the state. We find that changes in state aid have little impact on budget vote success....

In this paper, the introduction of direct-democratic decision-making in all EU decisions is considered when it is feasible without prohibitively increasing decision-making costs. We start with the contractarian argument that each constitution is a contract joining the citizens of a state and...

Previous theoretical and empirical research has shown that policymakers have an incentive to centralize government activities in order to weaken the competitive pressure of fiscal federalism. We propose and test a positive model of fiscal federalism in which centralization is less likely to...