Signature Gathering

Does direct democracy increase political participation?

Does direct democracy increase political participation? Rather than focus on state-level effects of the initiative process, this paper studies the effect of signature gathering campaigns on participation within a state. To this end we test whether parts of the state that are subject to more intense signature gathering campaigns, measured by the number of signatures gathered per capita, experience greater levels of political participation. We examine three measures of participation: registration, turnout, and ballot rolloff.

One of the biggest hurdles to qualifying an initiative for the ballot is gathering the required number of signatures. Yet little is known about these signatures' representativeness or demographic origin. Using data from eight recent California initiatives, we study the distribution of signatures across counties. We ten conduct regression analysis to study how characteristics of counties relate to the number of signatures gathered there.