Design, Meaning and Choice in Direct Democracy: The Influences of Petitioners and Voters by Shauna Reilly

Author:Shauna Reilly [Reilly, Shauna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Democracy, Political Science, Political Ideologies
ISBN: 9781317152224
Google: 4AkGDAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 30000606
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2010-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

In addition to examining individual ballot questions, I have also looked at the breakdown by direct democracy type, particularly because of the attention paid to citizen initiatives earlier in this book. Table 6.4 demonstrates that there are important variations across these measures. The citizen-driven initiatives are less frequent in the past ten years; nonetheless, these initiatives do have a wide range in reading complexity from seventh grade to requiring average citizens to have nearly 70 years of education to understand ballot questions. The legislative referenda, introduced and written by the state, have a larger spread from the fifth grade to 95 years of education. What is startling is that the mean reading level for all types of direct democracy is around the 17th-grade level—almost double the national average reading level. Further, legislative referenda written by the state have the highest mean grade level. This indicates that state-proposed measures, as well as citizen-driven ballot measures, are beyond the typical reading level of citizens.

Table 6.3 Proposition Type by Election Year

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