Preferences for Referenda: Intrinsic or Instrumental? Evidence from a Survey Experiment
| Author | Claudia Landwehr,Philipp Harms |
| Published date | 01 November 2020 |
| Date | 01 November 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321719879619 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
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Article
Political Studies
2020, Vol. 68(4) 875 –894
Preferences for Referenda:
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Intrinsic or Instrumental?
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321719879619
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Evidence from a Survey
Experiment
Claudia Landwehr and Philipp Harms
Abstract
The call for more direct democracy, and referenda in particular, is often heard and met with
support from large numbers of citizens in many countries. This article explores the motives for
supporting referenda: Do citizens support them for intrinsic reasons, because referenda allow
them to exercise their democratic rights more directly? Or are preferences for referenda
predominantly based on the expectation that they will produce desired policy outcomes and
thus instrumentally motivated? Our survey experiment explores such instrumental preferences by
assessing how substantial policy preferences affect individuals’ choice of referenda over alternative
decision-making procedures. We show that congruence between a respondent’s own opinion and
the expected majority opinion is associated with support for a referendum on a given matter, and
thus arrive at the conclusion that calls for referenda should be reassessed in light of the partly
instrumental character of procedural preferences.
Keywords
process preferences, democratic innovations, direct democracy, referenda
Accepted: 9 September 2019
Introduction
Both in political science and in political practice, democratic innovations are discussed as
a means to overcoming political disinterest and to reviving representative democracy
(Newton and Geissel, 2012; Bächtiger, 2014; Smith, 2009). The rise of populist parties
and movements, which is often viewed as a result of frustration with existing institutions
and power structures, has further propelled calls for procedural reforms. The apparently
most popular types of innovations are elements of direct democracy, ranging from citizen
initiatives over obligatory or facultative referenda to plebiscites. This article is a
Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Mainz, Germany
Corresponding author:
Claudia Landwehr, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Jakob-Welder-Weg 12, D-55128 Mainz, Germany.
Email: landwehr@politik.uni-mainz.de
876
Political Studies 68(4)
contribution to the growing literature on “process preferences,” which explores citizens’
attitudes to democratic innovations and their motives for supporting or rejecting reforms.1
More specifically, we explore and test for two different sets of motives actors may have
for supporting democratic innovations and direct democracy in particular. First, their pro-
cedural preferences may be motivated by an intrinsic value attached to the procedure.
People may thus value direct democracy because it enables citizens to participate in leg-
islation rather than merely in elections, to become authors of the laws they have to obey,
or because it sparks discussions and furthers civic virtues. Second, however, procedural
preferences may also be motivated by instrumental considerations. In this case, specific
procedures, such as a referendum, are supported because actors believe that they will
bring about their preferred policy outcomes. The first type of motive could be described
as input-oriented, the second one as output-oriented. Given that public debates about
democratic innovations mostly focus on their intrinsic merits and given that the literature
on process preferences mostly discusses normative determinants, a central goal of this
article is to draw attention to the relevance of instrumental motives behind process prefer-
ences. More precisely, we do this by assessing how support for referenda changes as a
function of own substantial preferences, given a level of generalized support for
referenda.
The structure of our article is as follows. We will first outline theoretical considerations
behind our argument that two types of motives matter for procedural preferences and give
an overview of the existing literature. Subsequently, we will explain the survey experiment
we conducted to identify effects of intrinsic and instrumental motives in the choice of a
referendum as decision-making procedure. We go on to present the results of our empirical
analysis and discuss our findings, coming to the conclusion that instrumental procedural
preferences require more attention in the debate about democratic innovations.
Theory: Explaining Preferences Over Procedures
In political science, there is a strong tradition that draws a sharp distinction between con-
stitutional decisions, including procedural ones, and substantial policy decisions.
According to contract theories, consensus on substantial policy decisions is, given the
diversity of interests and values in any modern society, out of reach. By contrast, consti-
tutional choices are viewed as allowing for at least hypothetical consensus. According to
Niklas Luhmann (1983), it is precisely because modern societies cannot establish a con-
sensus on substantial matters that procedures become the ultimate and only source of
legitimacy. Research in social psychology provides empirical evidence for the claim that
perceptions of procedural fairness enable cooperation even in the face of intense substan-
tial conflict (Lind and Tyler, 1988; Tyler and Lind, 2001). Focusing mostly on trials and
legal procedures, but also referring to legislative decisions, Tom Tyler and E Allan Lind
(2001) provide evidence for a “procedural justice effect” that enhances the acceptance of
decisions in individuals who disagree with them on a substantial level. The procedural
consensus on a set of “rules of the game” that are perceived to be fair may thus be viewed
as a prerequisite for the functioning of modern democracy. One of the central reasons why
consensus is deemed possible on the procedural level is that the outcome effects of pro-
cedures are assumed to be either non-transparent or non-existent.2 The contract-theoreti-
cal tradition has, in combination with the growing influence of institutional economics,
led to a view of institutions and procedures as cooperation structures with beneficial
effects on the community. However, this view of institutions blinds out the distributive
Landwehr and Harms
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effects of institutions themselves and ignores that the latter are the result of competition
and power struggles (Knight, 1992; Moe, 2005). Moreover, it cannot explain the choice
between alternative democratic decision-making procedures.
Recently, research on “democratic innovations” has highlighted forms of participation,
such as direct democracy and deliberative forums, that could complement or in part even
replace established representative institutions (Smith, 2009). When it comes to explaining
preferences over specific democratic decision-making procedures and reforms rather than
support for democratic decisions per se, the question “who wants democratic innovations,
and why?” becomes more pressing. Several studies have addressed determinants of sup-
port for different types of governance and process innovations: in their seminal contribu-
tions, John R Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse (2002) argued that a majority of
American citizens prefer a “stealth democracy” over a more direct and participatory
democracy and want to have as little as possible to do with politics. Russell Dalton et al.
(2001) find that less educated citizens and supporters of extremist parties are more likely
to support direct democracy. Asa Bengtsson and Mikko Mattila (2009) show that support
for both direct and stealth democracy is higher among those with less political knowledge
and low beliefs in external efficacy, although citizens leaning toward the left tend to favor
direct democracy, those leaning to the right tend to favor stealth democracy. Claudia
Landwehr and Nils Steiner (2017) argue that citizens’ distinct normative conceptions of
democracy affect their support for democratic innovations such as referenda, expert deci-
sion making, and citizen deliberation. Similarly, Joan Font et al. (2015) find evidence for
three distinct models of political decision-making processes among Spanish citizens: a
representative model, a participatory model, and a non-partisan technocratic model.
Which of these three models is preferred also seems to depend on the issue at stake, as
another study by Magdalena Wojcieszak (2014) shows: citizens seem to prefer direct
decision making for what Edward G Carmines and James A Stimson (1980) called “easy”
decisions and representative decision making for “hard” ones. Oser and Hooghe (2018)
draw on data from the European Social Survey 6 (2012) to show that different “citizen-
ship concepts” correlate with the willingness to engage in conventional and non-conven-
tional political participation, while Lisbeth Hooghe et al. (2017) find that strong
democratic norms increase citizens’ dissatisfaction with democratic institutions and pro-
cedures, especially where the quality of government is low.
A smaller set of studies considers outcome-oriented or instrumental motives for proce-
dural preferences. Ben Seyd (2013) focuses on electoral reforms within the British repre-
sentative system and presents compelling arguments for complementing a “classical”
political science perspective that assesses...
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