Direct democracy, personality, and political interest in comparative perspective
| Published date | 01 August 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/02633957221074897 |
| Author | Markus Freitag,Alina Zumbrunn |
| Date | 01 August 2024 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/02633957221074897
Politics
2024, Vol. 44(3) 469 –485
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/02633957221074897
journals.sagepub.com/home/pol
Direct democracy, personality,
and political interest in
comparative perspective
Markus Freitag and Alina Zumbrunn
University of Bern, Switzerland
Abstract
For many, direct democracy is said to increase political interest. To date, however, empirical
findings regarding this relationship remain inconclusive. In this article, we claim that this
inconclusiveness can be partly ascribed to the diverse effects that direct democracy has on
individuals. In other words, direct democracy influences political interest, but how and to what
degree depends on an individual’s personality traits. Running hierarchical regression models with
survey data from random samples of eligible American and Swiss voters, we arrive at the following
three conclusions: First, in both countries, the use of direct democracy is not directly connected
to political interest. Second, the Big Five personality traits affect the interest in politics. Third,
neuroticism, in particular, alters the relationship between direct democracy and political interest,
suggesting that a certain personality type is likely to be more sensitive to popular votes, and a
vibrant democratic environment can help to inspire interest in politics for people who, because
of their personality, tend to be detached from it. Quite intriguingly, these relationships hold
irrespective of the country and research period.
Keywords
Big Five, comparative politics, direct democracy, neuroticism, personality, political interest
Received: 24th June 2021; Revised version received: 10th December 2021; Accepted: 13th December 2021
Introduction
Political interest is seen as a key antecedent of civic engagement, effective self-governance
and thus as the lifeblood of democracy (Prior, 2019; van Deth and Elff, 2004). If we
accept a citizen’s degree of attention and curiosity towards politics as that important, it is
necessary to know how and why it is generated and under what political circumstances
it flourishes and subsides. Recent literature in political behaviour has increasingly
focussed on the role of direct democracy in the creation of political interest (Dyck and
Lascher, 2019; Ladner and Fiechter, 2012; Talpin, 2018). Direct democracy actively
Corresponding author:
Alina Zumbrunn, Institute of Political Science, University of Bern, Fabrikstrasse 8, CH-3012 Bern,
Switzerland.
Email: alina.zumbrunn@unibe.ch
1074897POL0010.1177/02633957221074897PoliticsFreitag and Zumbrunn
research-article2022
Article
470 Politics 44(3)
involves citizens in the decision-making process of a country and should thus influence
their interest in politics (Smith and Tolbert, 2007a; Tolbert and Smith, 2005). While some
studies have already shown a positive impact of the contextual degree of direct democ-
racy on an individual’s level of political interest (Benz and Stutzer, 2007; Dalton and
Weldon, 2013; Smith and Tolbert, 2007b), other studies find no significant correlation
whatsoever (Ladner and Fiechter, 2012; Voigt and Blume, 2015). Some literature even
assumes a negative relationship between direct democracy and political interest that
could be explained by an increase in democratic fatigue as direct democracy increases
(Kern and Hooghe, 2018). Altogether, it has to be noted that empirical findings on the
effects of direct democracy on political interest remain rather inconclusive. To some
extent, the conflicting results of previous studies can be attributed to different study
designs.
This is the starting point of our investigation. We would like to evaluate the effect of
direct democracy on political interest in two countries (Switzerland and the United States)
using the same study design. Against this background, we argue that the inconclusiveness
of previous studies can be partly attributed to the diverse effects direct democracy has on
each individual. In general, contextual factors are not expected to affect an entire popula-
tion in a uniform manner; instead, their effects vary depending on individual characteris-
tics such as traits, values, and resources. In particular, and looking to political psychological
approaches, it is more realistic to suggest that people react differently to environmental
stimuli depending on their personality (Freitag and Ackermann, 2016; Larsen, 2020;
Mondak, 2010). People process information differently and, therefore, may have diverse
reactions to the signals and stimuli environmental factors send (Taber, 2003). Accordingly,
the way a person perceives the frequency of popular votes may influence his or her level
of political interest. While some people with certain personality traits may be attracted to
politics as a result of greater citizen participation in policy making, others may be put off
by the political conflicts brought about by popular votes and, as a result, their political
interest may decline in accordance with their dispositional traits. Against this background,
we seek to demonstrate the importance of dispositions, situations, and their interactions.
This perspective also seems justified as resources are shown to have little influence on the
development of political interest (Prior, 2019). Moreover, the pervasive stability of inter-
est in politics at the individual level implies dispositional traits as possible sources.
We use the Big Five model as a broad framework to portray individual-level personal-
ity attributes and then deliver evidence on the function and value of this framework for
understanding the impact of personality on political interest. Building on recent work on
the Five Factor Theory, we argue that political attitudes should be a product of essential
dispositional traits and environmental factors (Cawvey et al., 2017; Freitag and
Ackermann, 2016; Furnham and Cheng, 2019; Gerber et al., 2011; Mondak, 2010;
Mondak and Halperin, 2008; Weinschenk and Dawes, 2017). Empirically, we focus on
the cases of Switzerland and the United States, two countries with the most advanced
forms of direct democracy worldwide.1 Both the United States and the Swiss cantons
present an excellent opportunity to assess the relevance of direct democracy. This two-
country design has the additional advantage that our hypotheses can be tested in two
contexts and at two points in time, leading to more generalisable results. Concretely, in
both contexts we measure the actual use of direct democracy with the number of popular
votes on citizen- and constitution-initiated initiatives and referenda. While these unique
institutional arrangements are almost impossible to study comparatively at the national
level because the range of variation is so limited, all of the 26 Swiss cantons allow for
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