SHAUN BOWLER, TODD DONOVAN, MAX NEIMAN, and JOHNNY PEEL
Institutional Threat and Partisan Outcomes:
Legislative Candidates' Attitudes toward
Direct Democracy

This study uses a three-state survey to examine how state legislators and legislative candidates view the ballot initiative process. We hypothesize that state legislators see the initiative as a rival to the legislature, and that the initiative is evaluated in terms of expectations about policy outcomes. We test whether opinions about the initiative are related to legislative incumbency, partisan interests, or both. We find that incumbents, regardless of party, are more interested in constraining the initiative than non-incumbents. We also find an independent effect of partisanship, with Republicans having a more positive view of the initiative than Democrats.