Research

“Pledging Democracy: Congressional Politics and Strategic Support for a National Initiative and Referendum.” (with Daniel A. Smith).  Earlier version presented at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the Southern Political Science Association.

Abstract: While Congress routinely delegates legislative authority to bureaucratic agencies and state governments, it has yet to devolve such power directly to the voters. There have been moments over the last century, however, in which individual members of Congress have chosen to publicly show support for direct democracy at the national level. In one such case, that of Senator Robert Owen and the 60th House, over one-hundred representatives declared support for a national advisory initiative and referendum during the 1906 campaign. We argue that the rationale for such a pledge was strategic, that these members of Congress acted as members of a minority party and simply played on district opinion in the face of close elections. Drawing on a unique dataset and employing logistic regression, we find that those members who pledged support for a national initiative and referendum were much more likely to be members of the minority party, to hail from states that had recently adopted direct democracy, and to have faced close electoral margins. Our findings not only offer answers to the questions of 1906, but also add new wrinkles to our larger understanding of both Congressional behavior and the institutional effects of direct democracy.