Voting in the rain: the impact of rain on participation in open-air assemblies

ABSTRACT

The analysis of how weather conditions influence participation at the ballot and whether bad weather influences ballot decisions has recently gained momentum. This paper analyses the influence of rain on participation in the Landsgemeinde – the main decision-making body of two Swiss cantons, wherein citizens meet on the main square in order to debate and decide bindingly on political matters of all sorts. We rely on a survey with an in-built conjoint experiment that presents citizens with several hypothetical Landsgemeinde situations characterized by randomly varied combinations of weather and other conditions such as outcome favorability, the expected closeness of the vote and the company available during the event. We find that rain not only decreases overall participation but it also lowers participation when votes are expected to be uncontested and for individuals who do not primarily attend the Landsgemeinde for political reasons.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizen assemblies
• voting
• participation
• political mobilization
• survey experiment
• rain

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank two anonymous reviewers and the editor for their very helpful feedback, the workshop participants of the annual Swiss Political Science Association conference for their valuable insights on earlier versions of the paper, as well as Ana Petrova for linguistic assistance. They are very grateful to Sean Mueller, Hans-Peter Schaub, Lisa Marti, Raffaele Ferrara, Valentin Hehl, Marc Bühlmann, Clau Dermont and Anja Heidelberger for their important help with the survey.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here

Notes

1. Compared to the rest of the Swiss cantons, the Landsgemeinde cantons grant their citizens more extensive political rights (see e.g. Schaub 2016). Contrary to ballot box cantons where people are only allowed to give their vote on a given proposal, Appenzell Inner Rhodes and Glarus also allow every citizen to go on stage and hold a speech in favor of or against a proposal at the Landsgemeinde. The proposals are prepared by the cantonal legislatives that, by themselves, have no final decision-making competence on laws and constitutional amendments. In the canton of Glarus, where the focus of our analysis lies, each speaker is also empowered to offer a counter-proposal on the spot, with such proposals consequently being included in the public and binding vote. In Glarus, citizens are also empowered to launch initiatives for constitutional or legal amendments. If they reach the support of 1/6 of the canton’s legislative body, these initiatives are directly subjected to a popular vote at the Landsgemeinde (if the threshold of 1/6 is not reached, the Landsgemeinde can still decide to put the initiative on the agenda of the next Landsgemeinde).

2. Citizens are allowed to use umbrellas. However, umbrellas need to be closed when the debate is over and citizens are asked to vote.

3. For example, relying on survey data from the National Election Studies (NES) on three election days, Knack (1994, 197) had to admit that two of these election days were «unusually dry days across the nation» and thus only displayed very little variation in rain patterns. With the help of our conjoint experiment, we are in a position to test for the influence of rain (or its absence) when other factors, such as the topics tabled on a specific day or the closeness of the race, remain constant.

4. For a critical view on using rain as instrumental variable see e.g. Horiuchi and Kang (2018).

5. Already ten years ago, an average of 81.5% of all votes in Switzerland were cast by postal voting (Klaus 2006, 2). However, the variety in postal voting rates across Swiss cantons is large. Interestingly, the canton of Glarus exhibits the highest share of votes cast at the polling stations on voting day (84%).

6. We thereby apply a mostly descriptive approach, i.e., we compare the conditional AMCEs for different groups in terms of their magnitude and significance. We do not generally consider the significance of the group differences (the interaction coefficients), which – in this kind of analysis – often fail to reach conventional levels of significance due to the low number of cases per sub-group. We only report the group differences in cases where these differences are statistically significant, and to emphasize the importance of these differences.

7. This interaction effect is significant at the 0.10 level (t = 1.82). Comparing close races to a situation where one’s position is likely to lose does not yield a (marginally) significant interaction effect.

8. In fact, individuals who perceive the Landsgemeinde as an important tradition are significantly more likely to participate in the Landsgemeinde (mean attendance rate in the conjoint analysis: 81.7% vs. 70.4% t = −16.678, df = 7136.4, p-value < 0.001). In contrast, the difference in participation between individuals strongly emphasizing the social aspect of meeting friends and those who do not is small (77.5% vs. 76.2%, t-value = −1.949, df = 6681, p-value = 0.05).

9. In fact, in further analyses (not presented here), we code the variable in a different way to generate groups of about equal size. We do so by grouping individuals who find it quite important to meet friends with others who find it very important. In the subsequent analyses, the rain effect is statistically significant for this group.

10. However, the literature suggests that exposure to dissonant views is particularly limited when people can self-select their networks, such as when they make friends, choose a neighbourhood or join an association (Mutz and Mondak 2006). Therefore, our measure of company should not be completely unrelated to the degree of exposure to dissonant views. Finding that sunny weather works as a driver of political participation when one is accompanied by friends or neighbours could be a first indication of the importance of similar views.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Isabelle Stadelmann-Steffen

Isabelle Stadelmann-Steffen is Associate Professor in Comparative Politics at the University of Bern. Her research interests include public policy (especially welfare state and energy), direct democracy and political behavior. Her articles have appeared in journals such as European Journal of Political Science, Governance, European Union Politics, Political Behavior, Electoral Studies, Journal of Social Policy, Public Choice, Energy Policy and Public Administration.

Marlène Gerber

Marlène Gerber is Deputy Director of Année Politique Suisse and lecturer and researcher at the Institute of Political Science, University of Bern. Her research interests include direct and deliberative democracy as well as the study of campaign effects.