[go: up one dir, main page]
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/qjecon/v107y1992i2p541-571..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Economics of Direct Legislation

Author

Listed:
  • John G. Matsusaka
Abstract
This paper develops a theory of direct legislation to explain (i) why some issues are resolved by popular vote and others by elected representatives, and (ii) why citizens vote on some ballot propositions and abstain on others. Evidence is provided by a new data set describing 871 California propositions. The main findings are the following. "Good government" issues were usually resolved by legislative measures and distributional issues by initiatives. Citizen-initiated legislation was more common when representatives were unresponsive to the electorate. Voter turnout was higher on distributional propositions than good government propositions. Voter participation on ballot measures has been increasing over time.

Suggested Citation

  • John G. Matsusaka, 1992. "Economics of Direct Legislation," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 107(2), pages 541-571.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:107:y:1992:i:2:p:541-571.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.2307/2118481
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:107:y:1992:i:2:p:541-571.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/qje .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.