THE PRACTICAL RESEARCHER

SHAUN BOWLER
University of California, Riverside
TODD DONOVAN
Western Washington University
Measuring the Effect of Direct Democracy on
State Policy: Not All Initiatives Are Created Equal

Numerous studies attempt to assess direct democracy's impact on state policy using measures of direct democracy based on dummy variables or the frequency with which initiatives appear on a state's ballots. We offer an alternative to these measures that accounts for how rules governing the initiative process vary among the states. We replicate several studies using different measures of direct democracy and demonstrate that the results of hypothesis tests can be contingent on how these institutions are measured. We contend that commonly used dummy variable measures of state direct democracy have validity problems and that hypothesis tests using such measures produce imprecise estimates of the initiative's effect on policy.