The Impact of Voter Initiatives on Economic Activity
Wellesley College Working Paper No. 2001-07
35 Pages Posted: 4 Nov 2001
Date Written: August 2001
Abstract
Recent studies have claimed that states with initiative systems of legislation use this more direct form of democracy to improve productive resource allocation. This paper compares the economic performance of states with initiatives to states that do not have initiatives. We first construct a simple growth model to identify the channel through which initiatives play an important role in determining economic activity; we then test the implications of this model using data for the 48 contiguous United States over the years 1969-1986. Our findings suggest that the states with initiative systems waste between 20 to 30 percent fewer resources than do non-initiative states resulting in better economic performance in terms of higher GDP growth and faster convergence.
Keywords: growth, initiatives, voting
JEL Classification: H1, H5, H8
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?
Recommended Papers
-
On Government Centralization and Budget Referendums: Evidence from Switzerland
-
By Matthias Benz and Alois Stutzer
-
Direct Democracy: Designing a Living Constitution
By Bruno S. Frey and Alois Stutzer
-
Who Controls? Information and the Structure of Legislative Decision Making
By Arthur Lupia and Mathew D. Mccubbins
-
The Role of Direct Democracy in the European Union
By Lars P. Feld and Gebhard Kirchgässner
-
The Economic Effects of Direct Democracy - A First Global Assessment
By Lorenz Blume, Jens Müller, ...
-
Making International Organizations More Democratic
By Alois Stutzer and Bruno S. Frey
-
The Economic Effects of Direct Democracy - a Cross-Country Assessment
By Stefan Voigt and Lorenz Blume