Why people vote in local level referendums: comparing Germany and the United States

ABSTRACT

Although local level referendums have been quite common in the last three decades, there is little research on who participates. This article seeks to address this gap in the literature and analyses the determinants of turnout in local level referendums in Germany and the USA. Our analysis tests for explanatory power of civicness, political knowledge, interest in local politics, saliency of the referendum topic, party cues and citizens as decision-makers. It controls for satisfaction with democracy, voting in local elections and education. We use individual level data collected through an original survey in February–April 2018, which included respondents who had referendums organized in their community, since they became eligible to vote. In both countries voting in local level referendums is driven by engagement with elections and political knowledge, while civicness and interest in politics have mixed effects.

KEYWORDS:

• Local level
• referendums
• political knowledge
• Germany
• US

Notes

1 To avoid the problem of ‘too many variables, too few cases’, we have included in the analysis only the control variables with the highest effect on the dependent variable of this study. We also tested for many other controls including age, gender, medium of residence, and frequency of referendums.

2 One possible explanation could have been age since the right to vote is relative to it, but there is no statistical correlation between frequency of referendums and age.

3 Following the suggestion of one reviewer to this journal, we ran several alternative statistical models, to ensure the robustness of results. The independent variables are ordinal and their interpretation can be sometimes problematic. We constructed models with multiple dummies for each variable and also models in which we aggregated some categories. The results were very similar to what we observe in the original ordered logit models presented in this article, which are simpler to interpret.