| In this thesis I build a political process model of direct democracy and political tactics. I test this model with a mix of research methods: a comparison of the interest group populations in four states, two movement case-studies, and a regression analysis of political protest rates in U.S. capital cities. I argue that political tactics derive from organizational resources and inter-group competition, as mediated by partisan control and institutional structures such as ballot initiatives. I start by examining the actors that donated to ballot measures in two states, California and Maine, during the 1990s. I find that large, prosperous groups—especially businesses, unions, and professional associations—dominated the campaigns. I then examine how direct democracy alters the distribution of groups engaging in other tactics. In a four-state comparison (California and New York, Maine and New Hampshire) I find that initiative states have more lobby groups and fewer protests. I also demonstrate a modest degree of overlap between lobbying and ballot usage, some overlap between lobbying and protest, but almost no overlap between ballot initiatives and protest. This leads naturally to my third question: how does direct democracy influence political protest? Using a new fifty-state dataset I show how the initiative option depresses the rate of state-directed demonstrations in capital cities. In combination, these data support my central contention that, instead of inviting participation by entirely new and previously unmobilized actors, direct democracy encourages institutionalization on the part of those already prepared to make political claims. To investigate the process qualitatively, I compared the tactics of two movements involved in debates over gay and lesbian civil rights issues. I show that direct democracy positively affects the mobilization and tactical agility of Christian conservative groups. Ballot initiatives do not affect the mobilization or tactics of the gay and lesbian movement, but the competitive strain of fighting these measures exhausts this movement's financial and organizational resources. The way in which direct democracy shifts political access thus has differential effects depending on group resources and movement structures. Because of this bias, direct democracy significantly shifts interactions and competition between movements and countermovements. |
