Does the Popular Vote Destroy Civil Rights?

Bruno S. Frey · Lorenz F. Goette

84 citations0/0 files storedAmerican Journal of Political Science

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Electoral Systems and Political Participation Political Theory and Democracy Political Conflict and Governance

Abstract

In her paper Putting Civil Rights to a Popular Vote (American Journal of Political Science 41:245-69), Barbara S. Gamble addresses the central and classical issue of whether the majority tyrannizes the minority in a (direct) democracy. She tests the hypothesis that civil opponents who have access to the initiative process will use direct democracy to thwart civil rights (246). On the basis of seventy-four civil initiatives in state and local ballots covering five issue areas (housing and public accommodation of racial minorities, school segregation, gay rights, English language laws, and AIDS policies) between 1959 and 1993, she comes to a firm conclusion: . the answer is quite clear .. anti-civil initiatives have an extraordinary record of success: voters have approved over three-quarters of these.... This pattern holds across all three decades and across all but one of the issue areas ..... (261). We challenge this central conclusion. While Gamble may be right for the period and issues investigated by her for the United States, we find the opposite result for Switzerland where three-quarters of the referenda held worldwide were undertaken (see Butler and Ranney (1994) for an analysis of Swiss democratic institutions, see e.g., Linder 1994; Steiner 1974). In this comment, we do not question her methodological approach. We show that considering the same type of civil issues put to the vote at the Swiss federal level as well as the cantonal and city level (for the case of Zurich), direct democracy protects civil rights. Moreover, we identify conditions under which minority interests have a particularly high probability of success. These may partly explain the striking difference between Gamble's results and ours.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 84 citations exist upstream.

References

1989Direct democracy: the politics of initiative, referendum, and recall 1997Putting Civil Rights to a Popular Vote 1995Referendums around the World: The Growing Use of Direct Democracy 1990The Age of Rights 1974Amicable Agreement Versus Majority Rule: Conflict Resolution in Switzerland 1984The City as a Legal Concept

Cited by

2007The Instrumental and Educative Effects of Ballot Measures: Research on Direct Democracy in the American States 2003Direct Democracy for Transition Countries 2004Beyond Outcomes: Measuring Procedural Utility 2010Path Dependency and Emergent Relations: Explaining the Different Role of Limited Profit Housing in the Dynamic Urban Regimes of Vienna and Zurich 2009The Transformation of Social Housing Provision in Switzerland Mediated by Federalism, Direct Democracy and the Urban/rural Divide 2013Anti-minority votes and judicial review

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.