| This dissertation is comprised of three empirical studies that explore both the determinants and consequences of election law restrictiveness in the American states. The first study examines why states restrict the public's ability to use the initiative process. I argue that states will move to increase election law restrictiveness when the initiative is perceived as threatening to legislative autonomy, majority party control over policymaking, or a state's fiscal health. I test these expectations using a novel dataset that catalogues both proposed and enacted restrictions to the initiative process between 1996 and 2011. I find evidence that, contrary to the expectations of prior works, threats to state fiscal health exert a minimal effect on subsequent changes to election law restrictiveness. Rather, it is the threat to state autonomy and majority party control over policy that appears to shape state legislative response to direct democracy; in particular, the education of a state's electorate, electoral volatility, and citizen-government distance each exert strong effects on the willingness of states to make it more difficult for the public to successfully use the initiative process. The second study examines several potential effects of election law restrictiveness. Recently, many U.S. states that allow citizen initiatives have passed laws designed to make it more difficult for an initiative to qualify for the ballot (e.g., by increasing the number of signatures required to get on the ballot), thereby making it harder for citizens to bypass the legislature and make direct changes to public policy. Such laws have reduced both the number of measures that make the ballot, and the number that pass on Election Day. I show that laws governing access of initiatives to the ballot also shape the policy agenda; provisions making it harder for proposals to get on the ballot decrease the complexity of the initiatives on the ballot. Since less complex initiatives are more likely to be understood by voters, and voters are reluctant to vote for measures they do not understand, more restrictive laws increase the percentage of ballot measures that are approved. Finally, the third study explores how the complexity of ballot measures shapes individual-level abstention. That is, why do individuals who have turned out to vote abstain from voting on certain ballot measures? Previous work examines abstention at the aggregate level by observing ballot roll-off, and focuses on the readability of the ballot summary for a measure as the primary determinant of whether individuals will abstain. In contrast, I hypothesize that three individual-level factors interact with the accessibility (i.e., ease or difficulty) of a ballot measure's issue content to influence one's propensity to abstain. Individuals with low knowledge, who are risk averse, and who attach low importance to the issue should be more likely to abstain from voting than those with high knowledge, who are risk acceptant, and who attach high importance to the issue. Furthermore, the impact of each of these individual-level traits strengthens as the issue raised in the measure becomes less accessible. I find strong empirical evidence for these hypotheses using a survey experiment. |
