Do Participatory Democratic Institutions Engender
Civic Engagement? Quasi-Experimental Evidence
Björn Tyrefors Hinnerich1, Per Pettersson-Lidbom2 and Kåre Vernby3
***Preliminary. Please do not quote or circulate without permission from
the authors***
1
Department of Economics, Stockholm University, E-mail: [email protected]
Department of Economics, Stockholm University, E-mail: [email protected]
3
Department of Government, Uppsala University, E-mail:[email protected]
2
Abstract
Do participatory democratic institutions stimulate civic engagement? Or will representative
institutions do a better job? We shed new light on this long-standing controversy using data
that are uniquely suitable to deal with the potential endogeneity inherent in studying these
questions. During the early twentieth century, the Swedish Local Government Act required
municipalities with a population above a certain threshold to be governed by representative
democracy, whereas municipalities with a population below that threshold were free to choose
assembly democracy instead. This allows us to credibly estimate the effect of forms of
democracy on two forms of civic engagement: turnout and voluntary associations. Our
findings show that participatory democratic institutions did not stimulate civic engagement.
Instead, turnout was considerably higher and associational life thrived where local
governments were governed by representative democracy.
Most contemporary observers see civic engagement as a key element in a well-functioning
democracy. The reasons for embracing high levels of citizen participation in political and
societal affairs vary depending on scholars’ normative persuasions, but they can essentially be
boiled down to the following three distinct propositions: participation makes policy more
responsive to the interests of citizens, it furthers the development of citizens’ social and
political capacities and it confers legitimacy to public policies (Teorell 2006). Unsurprisingly,
therefore, many decry the low levels of civic engagement that characterize modern
representative democracies (see, e.g., Barber 1984, Lijphart 1997, Skocpol 1999, Putnam
2000). Since these ills are often perceived to be inherent to representative democracy, one
proposed cure has been to entrust participatory institutions with the making of public policy
(see, e.g., Barber 1984, Bryan 1999). The movement for direct involvement in policy making
has not been confined to the established democracies in Europe and North America, it has
also made significant advances globally (Fung and Ohlin Wright 2003). At the same time,
there exists a widespread unease, even among some who are highly critical of representative
democracy, that participatory institutions will fail to sustain high levels of civic engagement
(Mansbridge 1980, Berry et al. 1993, Plotke 1997, Nylen 2002).
Despite of the centrality of the issue, there exist relatively few large-scale systematic studies
comparing the impact of various forms of direct democracy on civic engagement. Moreover,
the findings of those studies that do exist are often difficult to reconcile (see, e.g., Bryan 1999,
Zimmerman 1999, Boehmke 2002, Tolbert et al. 2003, Lowry 2005, Freitag 2006, Ladner and
Fiechter 2012). In this paper, we present unique quasi-experimental evidence that shed new
light on this controversy. After Sweden democratized, during a period of thirty years,
municipalities, which had large responsibilities in important policy domains, were variously
governed either by assembly or by representative democracy. The suffrage requirements were
identical for both types of democracies, but whereas partisan assemblies that were elected
every four years governed in representative democracies, assembly democracies were
governed by town meetings that were required to meet at least three times a year. To measure
civic engagement in this historical context, we have complied data on turnout in elections and
town meetings, and on the main voluntary associations. What is most notable, for our
purpose, is that the Swedish Local Government Act stipulated that municipalities with 1500
or less inhabitants were allowed to choose between assembly or representative democracy,
whereas municipalities with more than 1500 inhabitants were forced to adopt the latter
(Tyrefors Hinnerich and Pettersson-Lidbom 2012). We thus obtain an exogenous source of
variation in the form of democracy, which can be used to estimate the impact of
representative and participatory institutions on civic engagement.
Specifically, we can implement a fuzzy regression-discontinuity design (RD) using data on
the type of democracy employed in Swedish local governments between 1919 and 1939, and
data on political participation, which we define broadly to include turnout in meetings and
elections and membership in associations such as unions, temperance lodges and free
churches. The fuzzy RD shares the weak identifying assumptions of the well-known sharp
regression-discontinuity designs (see, e.g., Bloom 1984, Battistin and Rettore 2000, Hahn et
al. 2001 and Lee and Lemieux 2010). In essence, it utilizes the fact that whether the number
of inhabitants are a few less or a few more than the threshold above which municipalities are
forced to govern themselves by representative democracy can be considered as good as
random. We also perform additional analyses using a rich set of controls capturing the
political, economic and demographic situation in the municipalities.
To the best of our knowledge, our paper is also the first to provide quasi-experimental
evidence on the impact of representative and participatory institutions on participation in
political and societal affairs. It is therefore advantageous over previous studies for two
reasons. First, it ameliorates the problem of reverse causation. Indeed, it is highly plausible
that the level of civic engagement in a community will affect the choice of democratic
institutions. If this is true, any study attempting the to estimate the impact of institutions on
participation without employing a quasi-experimental design would generate severely biased
results. Second, our study minimizes the risk of omitted variables bias. In particular, both
levels of participation and institutional choices may be outgrowths of more deep-seated and
unobservable local characteristics. Under such circumstance, it will be extremely difficult to
estimate the impact of participatory institutions on political participation without a quasiexperimental research design.
Our findings show that participatory democratic institutions did not lead to more civic
engagement. In fact, all our results point in the opposite direction. While voter turnout was
relatively high and associational life thrived where local governments were governed by
representative democracy, the opposite was true in those municipalities that were governed by
assembly democracy. In particular, when comparing municipalities around the population
threshold, the results suggest that turnout was somewhere between 20 and 30 percentage
points higher in representative democracies. Moreover, the results suggest that whereas
associations thrived in representative democracies, they were poorly mobilized in direct
democracies. Further analysis shows that this holds for both free churches, temperance
associations and labor unions, but that the effects are the largest and most precisely estimated
for the latter.
The paper is divided into four parts. In the !rst, we describe the previous literature on the
impact of participatory and representative democratic institutions on political participation. In
the second, we describe the Swedish local government setting during the period we study and
place it in context. Our data and research designs are presented in the third and our results in
the fourth. In the !fth, we set out our conclusions.
The Impact of Participatory and Representative Democratic
Institutions on Civic Engagement
During the 19th and early 20th century, many contemporary observers feared the ongoing
process of democratization and the wide participation in politics and organizational life that
was expected to follow in its wake. In modern times, by contrast, most agree that a politically
and organizationally active citizenry is at the core of a well-functioning democracy. While
there is some disagreement over the direction, magnitude and scope of global trends in the
various forms of civic engagement (e.g. Stolle and Hooghe 2004), many scholars decry the
low levels of participation in political and societal affairs that characterize modern
representative democracies (e.g. Barber 1984, Lijphart 1997, Skocpol 1999, Putnam 2000).
What is most interesting from the perspective of this paper is that many perceive low civic
engagement as inherent to representative political institutions – some even going as far as
claiming that “[r]epresentation kills participation” (Barber 1984, xxxiv) – and that allowing
citizens to decide public policy directly would stimulate greater participation in political and
societal affairs. Is it true that participatory democratic institutions engender civic
engagement?
In what ways would the choice between participatory and representative democratic
institutions affect civic engagement? Analogously to Riker and Ordershook’s (1968) classic
model of the calculus of voting, we may posit a more general calculus of participation, in
which a citizen participates if, and only if, the benefit of the implementation of the citizen’s
preferred times the probability of affecting the collective outcome exceeds the cost of
participation (see, also, Nagel 1987, 26). Along these lines, Berry et al. (1993, 72-73) suggest
that participatory institutions may “offer citizens the chance to significantly influence the
decisions that affect the quality of life in their communities”, such that these benefits
outweigh the “costs in time and energy”, leading more citizens to participate. Echoing this
sentiment, Barber (1984, 272) claims that “people refuse to participate where politics do not
count – or counts less than rival forms of private activity”. Fung and Olin Wright (2003, 27),
too, argue that participatory political institutions seek to “sustain high levels of lay
engagement” by offering “the real prospect of exercising state power.” If the policy benefits
of participation are higher where participatory institutions are in place, this will lead to more
civic engagement in the form of greater citizen political participation and an increased
proliferation of voluntary associations.
There are, however, a number of arguments against the view that participatory institutions
will further civic engagement. Skeptics of participatory political institutions maintain that
they increase the costs of participation to prohibitive levels, and that they do not imply that a
broad portion of the population will have the potential to influence public policy. Beginning
with the cost side, it seems clear that direct citizen participation in policy-making is
considerably more demanding and time-consuming and that many see this as one of the main
drawbacks of participatory institutions (see, e.g., Berry et al. 1993, Plotke 1997). As
Mansbridge (1980, 70-71) writes in her seminal study of town hall meetings in New England,
assembly democracy is not only time-consuming, but also generates “fears of making a fool
of oneself, of losing control, of criticism, and of making enemies”, which, in turn, can “make
participants humiliated, frightened, and even more powerless than before”. This leads many
citizens to refrain from attending participatory forums and, of those that do attend, many are
wary of participating in the discussion and making their opinion heard. In representative
democracies, by contrast, parties fill an important function by acting as political entrepreneurs
that accrue the major costs of participation, and therefore stimulate various forms of
participation in community affairs (Pomper 1980). As a consequence, we would rather expect
civic engagement to be lower in assembly than in representative democracies, because the
latter form is less costly and demanding of most citizens. Advocates of participatory
institutions may also have overstated the ability of most citizens to influence policy outcomes
in such contexts. As Mansbridge (1980, 274) puts it, “a face-to-face assembly lets those who
have no trouble speaking in public defend their interests; it does not give the average citizens
comparable protection.”
A third position argues that which of the two opposing claims regarding the impact of
participatory institutions on civic engagement depends on the context. In particular, some
observers have argued that participatory institutions may suppress civic engagement in
conflictual contexts, such as in cases when socio-economic inequality generates situations of
dependency among participants. Mansbridge (1980, 273) argues that “[w]henever interests are
in conflict, the greater publicity of one’s own act and the greater sanction of one’s neighbor’s
visible disapproval in a face-to-face situation can stimulate conformity to the majority against
one’s own real interest” or lead to “nonparticipation in politics”. Barber (1984, 273), for his
part, concedes that such outcomes may prevail in “parochialized, hothouse communities”. If
this line of reasoning is correct, we would expect representative agents, such as parties, to be
especially important in accruing the costs associated with participation in policy making in
contexts where the distribution of socio-economic resources makes political participation
more costly for significant portions of the population. It is also possible that representative
democracy yields a better prospect of influencing public policy for the majority of citizens in
this context. As Mansbridge (2003, 515) argues, representatives may “negotiate more
perceptively and fight more skillfully than constituents have either the time or the inclination
to do.” In unequal and conflictual settings, it is thus possible that representative institutions
will stimulate more participation, not only by decreasing the costs, but also by increasing the
benefits, in terms of policy influence, of participation.
There exists relatively little systematic empirical work on the impact of participatory
democratic institutions. Research on the direct democratic institution par excellence, the
citizens’ assemblies in Athens in ancient Greece, suggests that, typically, about 20% of
citizens attended (Smith 2009, 39). Turning to the New England town meetings of more
recent times, which is one of the participatory institutions that most resemble the assembly
democracies we are going to study in our paper, show that few of the registered voters attend,
and that turnout is considerably higher in ordinary elections (Bryan 1999, Zimmerman 1999).
The findings from studies comparing those Swiss municipalities that are governed by citizens’
assemblies to those that are governed by representative democracy are, however, less clearcut (Schaub 2010, Ladner and Fiechter 2012).
Studies of closely related, but mote limited, institutions of participatory governance – which
typically devolve the making of some public policies, or the task of overseeing public
administrators, to citizens – typically yield disappointing results from the perspective of
political participation. Participatory governance reforms that have been carried out in the
United States, India and Brazil typically have low rates of attendance compared to ordinary
elections (Ghatak and Ghatak 2002, Baiocchi 2003, Isac and Heller 2003, Fung 2004). The
results of Besley et al. (2005) are more nuanced and show that while participation in village
meetings that discuss local resource allocation is generally very low, it varies considerably
across Indian states, and is fairly high in India’s most developed and least unequal state
(Kerala). In a study of participatory budgeting in Brazil, Baiocchi (2003) argues for a positive
relationship between this institution and the proliferation voluntary associations. On the other
hand, Goldfrank (2002), who studies participatory reforms in local government in Uruguay,
argues that they did not stimulate civic engagement in the form of organizational membership
and the number of associations, and that civic engagement fell in the wake of the reforms.
Turning to a less costly form of direct democracy – popular initiatives – Tolbert et al. (2003)
study respondents in the United States and find that their propensity to vote and contribute to
interest groups increase in their exposure to ballot initiatives. Boehmke (2002) finds that
states with initiatives have larger (and more diverse) interest groups populations, while Lowry
(2005) finds that variations in direct democratic provisions across US states have no impact.
In as study of Switzerland, Freitag (2006) studies cantonal variations and finds that
engagement in voluntary associations is higher where there are lower barriers to popular
initiatives.
The Swedish Case
The General Societal and Political Setting
In the early 20th century, Sweden was an agrarian, poor and unequal society. A large majority
resided in rural areas and depended for their livelihood on agriculture and related industries
such as fishing and forestry (ref). Sweden was also among the least developed and poorest
countries in Europe (Maddison 1995). By present standards, Sweden had a high level of
economic inequality, and top income data suggests that it was more unequal than several other
West European countries (Atkinson et al. 2011). One important explanation for this inequality
was Sweden’s failure to implement the land reforms characteristic of other European
countries that had also had a history of feudalism (Dovring 1965). During this period, land
was relatively unequally distributed. For example, it was less equal than in the United States
and Switzerland, but more equal than in United Kingdom (Vanhanen 2003). Neither did
Sweden abolish the institutions of primogeniture and fideicommissum for the landholding
aristocracy until 1963 thus facilitating the persistence of existing large estates (Segerstråle
1979). Finally, until they were legally abolished in 1945, Sweden had labor repressive
agricultural institutions such as the corvée obligations (“torparsystemet”) and the system with
contract-workers (“statarsystemet”) that were mostly paid in kind (e.g., Eriksson and Rogers
1978, Lund and Olsson 2005). As a result, farm workers earned less than 50% of
manufacturing workers during most of the period up to WWII (Elmer 1963).
The period studied in this paper consists of the decades that followed immediately after
Sweden’s democratization. Following a period of intense social unrest – arguably, the
massive strikes that preceded democratization were perceived as a revolutionary threat –
universal male suffrage to the second chamber of the Parliament was introduced in 1909 and
in 1918 women gained the right to vote. Up until 1918, votes in municipal elections were
weighted according to income and wealth. Thus, in some municipalities, one single individual
could have more than 50 percent of the total votes. For example, in 1871, there were 54 local
governments where one individual had a majority of votes. However, the maximal voting
power was limited to 10 percent in 1900. The reform of 1918 implied that women and men
that were at least 23 years old had one vote each and that companies and corporate bodies not
longer had voting rights.4
4
Those who were in bankruptcy or in the permanent care of poverty relief institutions were not eligible to vote.
Neither were prisoners, foreign citizens, people with unpaid taxes and people with cognitive disabilities.
Assembly and Representative Local Governments
Local governments have historically played an essential part of the Swedish society. In the
Local Government Act of 1863, municipalities were, for the first time, given independent
income taxation rights.5 During our period of investigation, 1919-1938, the average local
income tax rate was about 10 percent. Local governments had control over important public
goods and services within the areas of social welfare and education. Specifically,
municipalities were formally responsible for the following five spending programs: basic
compulsory education, social welfare or poor relief, child welfare, basic pensions and health
care. Basic compulsory education was the largest spending program constituting more than 40
percent of total spending while social assistance to the poor was the second largest program
with about 20 percent of total spending. During the period investigated in this paper,
municipalities were divided into three categories. Urban local governments were called cities
(“städer”), and semi-urban were called boroughs (“köpingar”) and rural were called rural local
governments (“landskommuner”). In 1950, there existed 133 cities, 84 boroughs and 2281
rural local governments. As we explain below, we only focus on rural local governments in
this paper.
Historically, Swedish local governments were governed by face-to-face assemblies
(“kommunalstämmor”) that consisted of all eligible voters. Until 1918, government by
representative democracy (“kommunfullmäktige”) was voluntary for rural municipalities,
whereas it was mandatory in cities with more than 3000 inhabitants. In practice, however,
only a tiny fraction of rural municipalities chose this option. Following a change in the Local
Government Act in December 1918, which was a part of the major constitutional reform that
extended equal and universal suffrage, national law required that municipalities with a
5
This section is based on the Swedish Code of Statutes (Svensk författningssamling, SFS). SFS 1862:13, SFS
1918: 1026 and SFS 1930:251.
population of more than 1500 people have representative democracy.6 Those with populations
below this threshold, on the other hand, could choose between direct and representative
democracy. As noted above, we will exploit the population threshold in order to carry out a
fuzzy regression discontinuity design.
Table 1 shows the number of municipalities that were governed by representative democracy,
and whether they had chosen it voluntarily or not, as well as the number that were governed
by assembly democracy, for the regular election years 1919, 1922, 1926, 1930, and 1934. As
is clear, the bulk of municipalities with a population size below the 1500 threshold chose to
keep direct democracy. However, Table 1 also shows that the number of municipalities that
voluntarily choose to switch to representative government quadrupled between 1919 and
1934.
[Table 1 about here]
In municipalities with representative democracy, elections were proportional with closed
party lists in multi-member districts and were held every fourth year. The main parties were
the Communists and the Social Democrats on the left and the Agrarian Party, the Liberal
Party, and the Conservative Party on the right. However, there were also a fairly large number
of elections that were characterized by Statistics Sweden as nonpartisan because there were no
lists with party political labels. The elected council was required to hold at least three meeting
per year, and national law required that a majority (for some decisions, a supermajority) of the
council be present to constitute a quorum. The chairman of the council and the vice-chairman
were elected on a yearly basis and the “executive” of the local government
(“kommunalnämnden”) was required to have 5 to 11 members and was elected by the council.
The number of council members ranged from 15 to 40 depending on the population size.
6
For a thorough discussion of the debate in Parliament over assembly and representative democracy that
preceded the changes in the Local Government Act of 1918, see Strömberg (1974) and Wallin (2007).
Importantly, none of these population thresholds were close to the threshold of 1500 used in
this paper.7
For municipalities with assembly democracy, the Local Government Act was identical, except
that assemblies of citizens rather than elected politicians made decisions.8 Decision-making
by the citizens’ assembly had to proceed as follows. After the discussion of an item on the
agenda had been concluded, the chairman made a motion. The assembly then took a voice
vote (“yes” or “no”) after which the chairman declared the outcome. If someone requested a
second vote, this vote could either be an open (a roll call vote) or closed vote (a secret ballot).
Any attendant at town meetings, thus always had the option of requiring a secret ballot. In
addition, eligible voters attending the town meeting were entitled to represent another voter
(one, at most) if she had the power of attorney do so.
Civic Engagement in Sweden 1919-1939
In the parliamentary elections that followed the introduction of female suffrage about 55% of
the eligible voters participated. This figure continued to grow during our period of study, and
in the 1940 parliamentary elections turnout stood at 70%. Looking at local elections in those
municipalities that practiced representative democracy, turnout was lower than in
parliamentary elections in the beginning of our period of study, but gradually increased and
was close to that for national elections at the end (Ersson and Wide 2001). Unfortunately, the
attendance rate at town meetings was not recorded by Statistics Sweden. However, using a
database that digitizes minutes from local governments in six out of Sweden’s then 24
counties, we have collected the minutes of the town meetings for a set of local governments
7
The closest threshold was at 2000, and stated that in municipalities with a larger population than this, the
council had to have, between 15 and 25 members.
8
Also, the chairman and the vice-chairman of the assembly had to be at least 25 years old and were elected for a
four-year term rather than on a yearly basis.
after democratization, and these contain information about attendance rates in case there was
a second vote (described above).9 Between 1919 and 1938, there were a total of 567 meetings
with a second vote. Consequently, there was a second vote in 19% of all required meetings.
We therefore have data on 74 local governments, and the average attendance rate was 14%
(Petterson-Lidbom and Tyrefors Hinnerich 2012).10 Table 2 summarizes turnout rates in local
elections for rural municipalities by the type of government during our period of study.
[Table 2 about here]
Voluntary associations were also an important and growing component of civic engagement
during this period. Membership in the three main popular movements at the time – free
churches, temperance associations and unions – had been growing steadily since the second
half of the 19th century and mobilized a large portion of the population during the period we
study. For instance, overall estimates suggest that in 1920 about 25% of Swedish adults were
members of one of these three main voluntary associations (Lundkvist 1977, 67). Historians
have pointed to their vital importance for Sweden’s democratization (see, e.g., Lundkvist
1977, Ch. 6). The union movement was an early champion of universal suffrage, together
with a large contingent of free churches and temperance associations. These popular
movements were also deeply involved in the political process at the local level. They
mobilized voters, held election rallies and, and in some cases, even printed ballots, in order to
affect election outcomes. Finally, they were “schools of democracy”, supplying members and
activists with education and organizational skills, and engaging in political socialization and
consciousness building (Johansson 1954, Ch. 6-7, Lundkvist 1977, Ch. 6).
9
According to our calculations, there was a second vote in 14% (608 meetings) of all required assembly
meetings (4440) and a secret ballot was used in 40% of these cases.
10
The 74 local governments for which we have attendance rates are simply those that are available in the
database at the time of writing this. In the future, those working with the database have plans to extend coverage.
The free churches and temperance movements were the earliest mass popular movement in
Sweden. The free churches started gaining momentum during the first half of the 19th century
and grew even more after Sweden took some steps towards religious freedom in the mid 19th
century. At the outset, these revivalist churches were, by virtue of their struggle for religious
freedom, revolutionary protest movements. Historical data also suggests that they, to a large
extent, mobilized workers, although there were also important contingents of upper class
members. As the 19th century came to its close, however, the share of farmers and artisans
was increasing at the expense of workers (Lundkvist 1977, 47-50, 104-105, 117). The period
of democratization in the early 20th century did, however, bring deep splits within the
movement. Although the majority of free churches were most closely tied to the Liberal Party,
a large minority was tied to the anti-democratic Conservative party. During the period after
democratization that we study in this paper, this pattern of association persisted. The free
churches and their papers were important forums for political debate; although they rarely
took official political stands after the issue of religious freedom had been settled (Johansson
1952, 90, 119-120, 136ff, 166-172).
Research shows that free church members’ local
political activity was mainly channeled through temperance associations and, in some cases,
trade unions. This was a conscious strategy, and allowed members of different free church
congregations, whose views on theology as well as other issues diverged, to join forces on the
specific political issues that united them (Lundkvist 1977, 168, 171).
The early 19th century also saw the emergence of organized temperance associations. The
associations were with few exceptions, religious, and there was often a considerable
membership and leadership overlap with the revivalist movement. But the temperance
associations also suffered from membership competition with the free churches. Towards the
end of the century, following the establishment of the International Order of Good Templars
(IOGT), the movement started to grow at a quicker pace and the total number of members in
free churches stood at about 250 000 in 1900. At this point, the movement was increasingly
turning their focus away from personal salvation to campaigning politically for local and
national referenda on prohibition. The campaign resulted in the national referendum in 1922,
in which the side favoring prohibition lost by a narrow margin (Johansson 1954, 26, 29-30,
Lundkvist 1977, 50-52, 67). Although the temperance movement was initially most closely
associated with the Liberals, but also to some extent the Conservatives, the 20th century saw
their gradual orientation towards the left of the political spectrum. Investigations of the
membership structure of temperance associations indicate that their recruitment base was
similar to that of free churches; a large group was workers, like in the free churches, but the
contingent of businessmen was smaller (Lundkvist 1977, 119). Whereas some lodges and
associations associated with the Conservatives were skeptical of universal suffrage, many
others gradually came to be advocates. One important reason was the political goal of
prohibition, an issue that became closely tied to that of universal suffrage during the first
decade of the 20th century.11 This development culminated in 1918, when the grand lodge of
IOGT, the largest of the temperance movements, declared its support of women suffrage and
its opposition to the system of income-weighted voting in municipalities. There were also
clear personal links between the temperance movement and the Social Democratic party. For
instance, teetotalers made up between 40 and 50% of the members of the second chamber of
the Swedish parliament during the period of our study, and a large majority of these were
Social Democrats. During the 1920s, many of the Communist parliamentarians were
teetotalers (Johansson 1952, 109-110, 118, 125, 157, 166-172). At the local level, temperance
11
In particular, the temperance movement became advocates of allowing municipalities to hold local referenda
with universal suffrage on whether or not to prohibit the sale of alcoholic beverages. Having taken the step of
advocating universal suffrage on matters of utmost importance to local public finances – taxes from the sale of
alcoholic beverages could amount to as much as 12% of local revenues – the step to advocating universal
suffrage was not far. The movement for this local veto against the sale alcoholic beverages was therefore
perceived as threatening by leading Conservatives (Lundkvist 1977, 184-185).
associations mobilized voters and supplied political candidates for all parties, but primarily
the Liberals and the Social Democrats (Lundkvist 1977, 186).
The largest popular movement during our period of study was the trade unions. They were
also the youngest, only beginning to take form in the late 20th century. Despite considerable
employer resistance it managed to grow quickly during the first part of the 20th century
(Johansson 1954, 31-42). The massive loss of members that resulted from the defeat in the
general strike of 1909 was only temporary and, in 1920, about 400 000, or 31%, of workers
were union members. This was a lower than in many other West European countries, such as
the United Kingdom, but after 1920 the Swedish union movement continued to grow rapidly.
In 1940, it organized almost a million workers and well over 100 000 white collar workers.
This corresponded to a unionization rate of 66% among workers and 58% among all wage
earners. During this entire period, however, workers in agriculture were very poorly organized
in comparison to other industries, even if the unionization rate grew considerably within this
category as well (Kjellberg 1983, 269-272). The movement was an early champion of
universal suffrage, as was evidenced by the political general strike of 1902 which mobilized
over 100 000 workers. The vast majority of unions were closely allied with the Social
Democratic party, although parts of the movement had close ties to the Communists. Of
national parliamentarians, between 20 and 40% were union members during our period of
study, all of which belonged to the Social Democrats and Communists (Johansson 1952, 166172). At the local level, trade unions mobilized voters and supplied candidates, primarily for
the Social Democrats (Lundkvist 1977, 186).
In Table 3, we show the development of associational memberships for the three types of
organizations included in our study by the type of government during our period of study.
[Table 3 about here]
Data and Research Design
In order to study the impact of the participatory democratic institutions that existed in some
Swedish rural communities during the period following democratization on civic engagement,
we have collected a new and comprehensive data set. Given the unique features of the Local
Government Act of 1918 that we have described above, we can use this data set to generate
credible estimates of the causal effect of assembly democracy on civic engagement using a
fuzzy regression discontinuity design. These data and the design are described in the
following.
Data
Our data is a new and comprehensive panel consisting of about 2500 local governments
during the period 1918-1938. Our data on civic engagement comes from the Popular
Movement Archive and contains annual membership figures for all unions, free churches and
temperance associations during this period. These data were originally collected by Carl
Göran Andrae and Sven Lundkivst at the Department of History, Uppsala University (see, e.g.
Lundkvist 1977) and have previously been used in several quantitative studies of the
emergence and spread of popular movements in Sweden during the first half of the 20th
century (see, e.g., Hedström 1994, Sandell 2001, Edling and Liljeros 2003). All remaining
data comes from both published and unpublished material from Statistics Sweden, the
government agency responsible for producing official statistics about Sweden. The
unpublished material is kept in the National Archives of Sweden.
We have also collected 21 baseline or pre-treatment characteristics, i.e., variables dated before
the introduction of the two treatments—direct or representative democracy—in 1919. One set
of variables consists of characteristics of social-welfare programs which include the baseline
outcome—aggregate welfare spending—together with the number of total recipients including
children, the number of adults, the number of children directly supported, the number of
children indirectly supported, the number of people receiving full support, the number of
people boarded out, the number of people in public institutions (i.e., the number of
poorhouses), the number of public institutions and the number of slots available in the public
institutions. The other set of variables consists of three geographic variables: total area and
land area, three economic variables: arable land, income tax base and economic structure
(percent of the economy based on agriculture), population size, and four variables capturing
the political characteristics of the community: the number of eligible voters at the
parliamentary elections in 1917, the turnout at the parliamentary elections in 1917, the
proportion of left-wing voters at the parliamentary elections in 1917, the number of union
members and an indicator for having at least one labor union in the municipality.
Table 4 contains descriptive statistics for the main variables and the pre-treatment control
variables used in this paper.
[Table 4 about here]
The Fuzzy Regression Discontinuity Design
The fuzzy regression discontinuity design differs from the more-well known sharp regression
discontinuity design in that crossing the threshold used in the application does not necessarily
cause the probability of being treated to jump from zero to one. All the fuzzy RD design
requires is that the probability of treatment jumps at the threshold (Lee and Lemieux 2010).
In our particular application, those municipalities with a population over the threshold of 1500
inhabitants are forced to govern themselves by representative democracy whereas those
remaining were free to choose between assembly and representative government. In
particular, we will estimate a regression of the following form:
(1)
!!" ! ! ! !!!" ! ! !!"!! ! !!"
where i indexes municipalities and t indexes years. !!" is the outcome variable (i.e. one of our
measures of civic engagement), !!"!! !is the forcing variable (population size at t-1), and !!! is
an indicator variable taking the value 1 if a local government has direct democracy and 0 if it
has representative democracy. The parameter of interest is !, which is the effect of having
direct rather than representative democracy. Since our RD design is fuzzy, we will use the
eligibility rule!!!" ! !!!!"!! ! !"##! as an instrumental variable for!!!" . It is important to
stress that we have a compliance problem. However, since the treatment rule is only binding
for those municipalities with populations above the threshold, the problem is only one-sided
(e.g., Bloom 1984, Battistin and Rettore 2008). Therefore, our estimate of the parameter !
corresponds to the effect of the treatment on the treated.
One aspect of the Local Government Act complicates our analysis, namely the status-quo bias
in favor of representative democracy. In particular, this problem arises because a municipality
that has representative democracy cannot switch to assembly democracy until after five years,
even if its population falls below 1500. We solve this by redefining the assignment variable as
(2)
!!" ! !"# !!"!! ! !!!"!#
where !!!"!# !is the population size in 1918. The treatment rule can then be defined as
!!" ! !!!!" ! !"##! and we estimate the following specification:
(3)
!!" ! ! ! !!!" ! ! !!"!! ! !!"
where we use !!" !as an instrument for !!" . To approximate ! !!"!! !we use a number of
different order of polynomials of the forcing variable (1st up to 3th order). Moreover, we use a
number of different window sizes around the population threshold of 1500 ranging from ±500
to ±63. When narrower windows are used, ! !!"!! !can be approximated with lower order
polynomials.
Finally, as can be seen above, our data has a panel structure, but we follow Lee and Lemieux
(2010) who strongly recommend that one treat panel data as a pooled-cross-section so as to
avoid imposing a specific dynamic structure, which would not, in any case, improve our
prospects of identifying the causal effect of interest. However, in order to avoid the potential
mischiefs that may result from autocorrelation, we follow their suggestion to use
municipality-clustered standard errors.
Results
To gauge whether participatory or representative democratic institutions do a better job of
stimulating civic engagement, we begin by showing the fuzzy-RD results for the impact of
these institutions on turnout and total membership in voluntary associations. These are then
followed by auxiliary analyses where we assess the robustness and credibility of our results.
Finally, we present some extensions to our main analysis.
Main Results
Figure 1 shows the first-stage relationship between the forcing variable and direct democracy
and Figures 2 and 3 show the reduced form relationship between the forcing variable and
voter turnout in municipal elections and total associational memberships. We have plotted
conditional means where observations have been grouped into bins of size 50 and we have
graphed the outcome variables as a 3rd order polynomial function of the forcing variable on
each side of the threshold. Beginning with the first-stage relationship in Figure 1, it shows that
there is a large leap in the probability of having direct democracy as one crosses the 1500
threshold. In particular, the probability of having direct democracy increases by about 50
percentage points. As can also be seen, there is near perfect compliance on the right-hand side
of the population threshold. The reason why there exists a few observations that have
population figures higher than 1500 and still have direct democracy is not that these
municipalities were excepted from the rule. Rather, it is a consequence of the fact that we had
to redefine our forcing variable because of the status-quo bias in favor of representative
democracy that was built into the Local Government Act (see equation (2)). For all practical
purposes, however, we have perfect compliance among the municipalities whose value of the
forcing variable exceeds 1500.12 Turning to the reduced form relationships between the
forcing variable and our measures of civic engagement in Figures 2 and 3, we see that there
are clear discontinuities at the thresholds in both figures. Moreover, the sizes of the jumps are
large. Judging from Figure 1, mean voter turnout almost doubles at the threshold. And in
Figure 2, we see that average associational memberships jumps by 60, or approximately 75%,
when passing the threshold.
[Figure 1 about here]
[Figure 2 about here]
[Figure 3 about here]
Turning to the RD results, they are in Table 5 and 6. In each table, we present three different
estimates:
(i)
The reduced-form effect, i.e., Yit = a + bGit + g(Wit) + !it,
(ii)
The first-stage effect, i.e., Dit = c + dGit + h(Wit) + "it,
(iii)
The instrumental variable (Wald) estimate, i.e., the ratio between the estimates
of the reduced-form effect and the first-stage effect.
12
The estimated treatment effect with imperfect compliance on both sides is a local average treatment effect
(LATE) but it converges to the treatment effect on the treated (TOT) when one moves towards perfect one-sided
compliance (see, e.g., Bloom 2009). For all practical purposes, therefore, this paper estimates the TOT rather
than the LATE of direct democracy on civic engagement.
Panel A of Tables 5 and 6 shows the reduced-form estimates, Panel B shows the first-stage
estimates, and Panel C displays the Wald estimates.
[Table 5 about here]
[Table 6 about here]
Beginning with the reduced form estimates in Panel A, the estimates suggest that civic
engagement is adversely affected by direct democracy. Depending on the exact model
specification, the results in Table 5 suggest that voter turnout drops by between 12 and 15
percentage points when crossing the 1500 threshold. Given that average voter turnout for our
sample during this period was 28.5 percent, this is indeed a large effect. The reduced form
estimates for associational memberships are in Table 6, vary somewhat more than those for
turnout. They suggest that the number of memberships drop by between 70 and 140 when
comparing those that could choose direct democracy to those who could not. Like was the
case with voter turnout, this too is substantively large effect given that the average number of
association members for our sample is 192.5.
The first-stage estimates that are in Panel B of Tables 5 and 6 show that the impact of the
threshold on the proportion of municipalities that had direct democracy. For the sample used
to analyze voter turnout, the share of municipalities having direct democracy increases by
between 43 and 55 percentage points depending on the bandwidth. As can be seen from Table
6, the corresponding figures for the sample used to analyze associational memberships are 35
and 41 percentage points. All first-stage effects in Tables 5 and 6 are precisely estimated.
Panel C of Tables 5 and 6 shows the estimated causal effect of direct democracy on our two
measures of civic engagement. This is analogous to the Wald estimate, which is the reduced
form estimate divided by the first-stage estimate. As can be seen from Table 5, the treatment
effect on the treated of direct democracy on turnout is large and negative. Our estimates
suggest that direct democracy lowers turnout by between 26 and 31 percentage points. The
estimates for associational memberships are also large but somewhat more varying.
Depending on the bandwidth, they suggest that direct democracy lowers the number of
members by somewhere between 180 and 370.
Robustness Checks
As mentioned when discussing the historical background to our case, before 1919
municipalities with more than 3000 inhabitants were forced to have representative democracy.
The remaining municipalities could choose direct democracy, which is something that almost
all of them did. The reform that was undertaken in 1919 and which underlies our estimation
strategy changed the threshold to 1500. Our data includes a rich set of pre-reform control
variables for each municipality, which makes it possible to evaluate whether these variables,
which were determined before 1919, are balanced on either side of the 1500 threshold. In a
previous paper, we have shown that there is little evidence for an effect of the threshold on a
large set of 21 economic, geographic and political baseline characteristics, providing strong
support for the notion that whether the number of inhabitants in a municipality are a few less
or a few more than 1500 can be considered as good as random.
In addition, we can test whether including a large number of baseline characteristics in our
RD regressions affects our conclusions. Table 7 displays the results when we include the
abovementioned 21 pre-determined covariates as well as time dummies and the total number
of association memberships for 1918. The sample is slightly reduced when adding the pretreatment controls. Therefore, we show both the results with and without controls for the
sample for which we have data on pre-treatment controls. As can be seen when comparing
Panels A and B, the results for voter turnout are hardly affected at all as the magnitude and
significance of the coefficients are very close, irrespective of bandwidth. Turning to
associational memberships, and comparing the results in Panel C in Table 7 to those in Panel
D, we see that the magnitude of the coefficients tends to decrease upon the inclusion of the
pretreatment controls. However, the effects are still substantively large and statistically
significant.
[Table 7 about here]
One outstanding issue concerns our forcing variable: population size. If there were any
possibilities for municipalities to strategically misreport it, this would render our design
problematic. Fortunately, from our perspective, the municipalities themselves did not
administer the population registers. Instead, the Swedish State church was charged with
recording births, deaths as well as migrations in and out of each municipality. In practice, this
task fell on the clergyman of each parish or one of his assistants. Therefore, municipalities
could not misreport their population size. However, although it does perhaps seems
farfetched, one can not a priori rule out the possibility that municipalities might actively
encourage in- and out-migration with the objective of staying below (or above) the 1500
threshold. This would, again, render municipalities on either side of the threshold
incomparable, and thereby invalidate our RD approach. To test for sorting around the
threshold, we use the density test by McCrary (2008). According to this test, there is no
significant change in the density when crossing the 1500 threshold. The results from the
McCrary density test are shown graphically in Figure 4 where the plot shows local densities
with bin size 19 and the density as a non-parametrically estimated function of the forcing
variable together with 95% confidence intervals.
[Figure 4 about here]
Extensions
Thus far, we have only distinguished between two forms of civic engagement: voter turnout
and membership in associations. However, we have information on three types of association
membership in our data. This feature of our data can be utilized to indirectly gain some
insight into whether direct democracy suppressed civic engagement across all socio-economic
strata or just some. This seems especially important given that a great deal of the interest in
participatory democratic institutions is motivated by the belief that they will empower
marginalized groups (see, e.g., Fung and Olin-Wright 2003, Smith 2009).
Table 8 presents our disaggregated analysis. To conserve space, we only show the secondstage results with pre-treatment controls, but the same basic pattern emerges when we do not
include the controls. As can be seen, direct democracy has a negative impact on all three types
of association. However, the size of the effect is clearly largest for unions, and it is only for
this outcome that the effect is statistically significant across all specifications. This means
that our results on aggregate membership are primarily driven by union membership. Since
unions were the only associations in which all members were working-class, the results
suggest that direct democracy first and foremost suppressed participation among the lower
socio-economic strata.
[Table 8 about here]
Conclusion
Beginning with the student movements of the 1960s, calls have been sounded for creating
arenas where citizens can engage more directly in politics and policy making. One important
argument has been that such reforms would help us deal with the low civic engagement that
allegedly plagues representative democracy. Little empirical research exists, however, on the
basis of which we can evaluate the veracity of such assertions. The dearth of such empirical
evidence becomes even more troubling when one considers the fact that experiments with
more direct forms of citizen involvement in politics have become increasingly common in
developing countries. The few systematic studies that do exist are correlational and their
conclusions are incoherent. Thus, the fact of the matter is that we still do not know whether
direct democracy stimulates civic engagement or whether representative democratic
institutions will do a better job.
This study provides the first quasi-experimental evidence on this issue. Using a panel of
Swedish local governments 1919-1938, we exploit a unique feature of the Swedish Local
Government Act to generate credible estimates of the causal effect of assembly democracy on
civic engagement. The fact that municipalities with less than or equal to 1500 inhabitants
could choose between adopting assembly or representative democracy, whereas others had to
adopt representative democracy, allows In our empirical analysis, we find that participatory
democratic institutions has a large dampening effect on citizen participation in political and
societal affairs. In particular, when comparing municipalities around the population threshold,
our results suggest that turnout was somewhere between 20 and 30 percentage points higher
in representative democracies. Moreover, the results suggest that whereas associations thrived
in representative democracies, they were poorly mobilized in direct democracies. This is
especially true of unions, suggesting that participatory institutions have a particularly adverse
impact on the civic engagement of lower socio-economic strata. All our results are robust to
the inclusion of a large number of controls and we find no evidence of sorting around the
population threshold.
What, then, are the broader implications of our results? First, and most obviously, they
strongly suggest that it might not be possible to solve the problem of low civic engagement by
introducing participatory democratic institutions. Second, they are especially disheartening
given the recent drive for reforms aiming at introducing participatory forms of governance in
developing countries. During the period when assembly democracy was practiced, Sweden
was a newly democratized developing country characterized by high levels of economic
inequality and poverty. Moreover, it still retained features of a labor repressive agricultural
system that had been put in place long before democratization. Going all the way back to
Rousseau (1762, III:4), theorists of participatory institutions has suggested that such
institutions are unlikely to work well in these kinds of societies. Our findings do nothing to
assuage these fears. On the contrary, we find that civic engagement suffers when direct
democracy is introduced in a context where socio-economic inequality is such that it
generates situations of dependency among participants.
One possible retort to our findings is that many proposals for increasing participatory
governance do not advocate doing away with existing representative institutions, but merely
seek to open up new additional venues for direct participation. Unless there is a spillover
effect, so that low participation in the participatory channels suppress participation in the
representative channels, adding new venues for participation might, in theory, increase overall
civic engagement. Without more and better research on this topic, however, we will not know.
Another possible retort is that the form of direct democracy studied here – popular assemblies
– is not representative of other forms of direct democracy such as referenda. Given that ours is
the first study of the impact of direct democracy on civic engagement that uses a credible
research design, this is, of course, an open question. And irrespectively of whether there is
something to such and objection or not, our findings regarding the impacts of assembly and
representative democracy on civic engagement go to the heart of democratic theory. As Smith
(2009, 30) writes, “the idea of a popular assembly where citizens engage in face-to-face
interactions and decision-making is arguably the touchstone for much writing on citizen
participation”.
Our results also shed new light on scholarly controversies regarding the impact of direct
democracy on public policy. As we said in the introduction, many value civic engagement
because they believe that participation makes policy more responsive to the interests of
citizens. A large number of studies have shown that direct democracy leads to less
government spending. Some have interpreted this in light of accountability, arguing that
voters are more fiscally conservative than their representatives, and that direct democracy
then limits ’excessive’ spending (see, e.g., Bails and Tieslau 2000). An alternative
interpretation is that in a direct democracy, it is easier for the well-to-do elite to monopolize
the policy-making process (Tyrefors Hinnerich and Pettersson-Lidbom 2012). Our results
speak strongly in favor of the latter explanation in that they show that various forms of
societal and political participation are substantially lower in direct democracy.
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Democracy in Action.
Table 1. Number of local governments with representative and assembly democracy
Election year
Representative democracy
Assembly democracy
Mandatory
Voluntary
1919
870
67
1469
1922
889
117
1398
1926
887
147
1377
1930
873
192
1354
1934
867
274
1273
Table 2. Average voter turnout (%) in the rural local government elections and assemblies
Election year
Representative
Assembly
1919
1922
1926
1930
1934
52
28
42
51
58
7
9
11
10
18
Notes: Turnout rates for assembly democracies are calculated on the basis of meeting attendance and the number
of eligible voters in the municipality in question
Table 3. Average number of association memberships in the rural representative and assembly
democracies
Election year
Representative
Assembly
Panel A. Union memberships
1919
1922
1926
1930
1934
Panel A. Free church memberships
1919
1922
1926
1930
1934
Panel A. Temperance association memberships
1919
1922
1926
1930
1934
96.96
125.6
163.0
185.7
195.6
6.591
6.471
9.051
25.60
14.67
91.38
94.02
94.36
92.82
93.35
17.00
18.52
18.38
17.90
18.00
154.9
149.4
142.8
112.1
110.9
26.92
19.85
17.22
14.74
15.10
Notes: Turnout rates for assembly democracies are calculated on the basis of meeting attendance and the number
of eligible voters in the municipality in question
Variables
Table 4. Descriptive Statistics for all rural local governments
Mean
St.Dev.
min
max
Panel A. Outcome variables 1919-1938
Voter turnout
Total number of association memberships
Number of unions members
Number of free church members
Number of members in temperance associations
0.285
192.5
80.18
49.75
62.52
0.216
423.9
248.7
113.2
158.8
0.0005
0
0
0
0
0.81
12199
11036
8171
7102
Panel B: Treatment determining or forcing variable 1919-1938
Population size
1706
2008
90
26491
Panel C: Baseline or pre-treatment characteristics as measured in 1917 or 1918
Sum of aggregate social welfare spending
Number of total recipients including children
Number of adult recipients
Number of children directly supported
Number of children indirectly supported
Number of people receiving full support
Number of people boarded out
Number of people in public institutions
Number of public institutions
Number of slots available in public institutions
Total area (km")
Land area (km")
Arable land (km")
Income tax base
Economic structure (% agriculture)
Population size
Number of eligible male voters at the
parliamentary elections in 1917
Number of voters at the parliamentary elections
in 1917
Proportion of left-wing voters at the
parliamentary elections in 1917
Number of union members
Indicator for having at least one labor union
4763
59
38
7
14
21
7
13
0.77
19
18163
17033
1573
204645
49.6
1706
359
7891
104
59
15
38
28
14
20
0.58
24
81553
75877
1195
446346
22.1
1997
373
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
15
0
3713
0
110
0
119291
1714
1090
289
581
295
139
196
8
200
1.947e+06
1.814e+06
13524
6.691e+06
98.5
21648
4373
228
234
0
3003
0.29
0.20
0
1.00
22
0.16
87
0.37
0
0
1047
1
Note: All nominal values are deflated with CPI with 1914 as the base year.
Table 5. Estimates from the regression-discontinuity design on voter turnout
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
Panel A: Reduced form relationship between voter turnout and the instrument Git= 1[Wit ! 1500]
Reduced form effect
-0.144***
(0.047)
-0.123*
(0.066)
-0.151***
(0.051)
-0.132*
(0.070)
-0.130**
(0.065)
Panel B: Reduced form relationship between direct democracy and the instrument Git= 1[Wit ! 1500]
First-stage effect
0.552***
(0.077)
0.430***
(0.093)
0.537***
(0.083)
0.431***
(0.098)
0.452***
(0.093)
Panel C: The causal effect of direct democracy versus representative democracy on voter turnout
Direct democracy =1
-0.260***
(0.075)
-0.285**
(0.137)
-0.282***
(0.083)
-0.307**
(0.143)
-0.287**
(0.128)
Observations
3,502
1,704
1,704
790
413
250
3
250
2
125
2
63
1
Bandwidth
500
Degree of polynomial in 3
the forcing variable Wit
Notes: Standard errors clustered at both the municipality level and the running variable Wit are within parentheses. The forcing variable Wit it is defined as
max{Xit-1, Xi1918} where X is population size. Mean for the indicator of having at least union club is about 0.43 for local governments with
representative democracy near the threshold. * Significant at the 10 percent level, ** Significant at the 5 percent level, *** Significant at the 1 percent level.
Table 6. Estimates from the regression-discontinuity design on the number of association memberships
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
Panel A: Reduced form relationship between the number of association memberships and the instrument Git= 1[Wit ! 1500]
Reduced form effect
-72.957**
(31.417)
-109.169**
(43.877)
-76.213**
(31.775)
-141.325***
(47.148)
-101.275**
(42.667)
Panel B: Reduced form relationship between direct democracy and the instrument Git= 1[Wit ! 1500]
First-stage effect
0.409***
(0.084)
0.352***
(0.103)
0.409***
(0.089)
0.378***
(0.108)
0.385***
(0.102)
Panel C: The causal effect of direct democracy versus representative democracy on the number of associations memberships
Direct democracy =1
-178.337**
(83.800)
-310.209*
(160.841)
-186.144**
(86.787)
-373.924**
(172.432)
-262.800*
(137.391)
Observations
14,253
6,986
6,986
3,327
1,773
250
3
250
2
125
2
63
1
Bandwidth
500
Degree of polynomial in 3
the forcing variable Wit
Notes: Standard errors clustered at both the municipality level and the running variable Wit are within parentheses. The forcing variable Wit it is defined as
max{Xit-1, Xi1918} where X is population size. Mean for the indicator of having at least union club is about 0.43 for local governments with
representative democracy near the threshold. * Significant at the 10 percent level, ** Significant at the 5 percent level, *** Significant at the 1 percent level.
Table 7. Estimates from the regression-discontinuity design on civic engagement for the sample with with pre-treatment controls
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
Panel A: The causal effect of direct democracy on voter turnout without pre-treatment controls
Direct democracy =1
-0.270***
-0.299**
-0.293***
-0.321**
-0.301**
(0.076)
(0.136)
(0.082)
(0.142)
(0.127)
Panel B: The causal effect of direct democracy on voter turnout with pre-treatment controls
Direct democracy =1
-0.256***
-0.256**
-0.270***
-0.283**
(0.069)
(0.119)
(0.071)
(0.127)
-0.285***
(0.086)
Observations
408
3,474
1,693
1,693
785
Panel C: The causal effect of direct democracy on the number of association memberships without pre-treatment controls
Direct democracy =1
-187.353**
-325.656*
-194.957**
-389.618**
-274.018*
(88.416)
(170.495)
(89.696)
(181.041)
(143.597)
Panel D: The causal effect of direct democracy on the number of association memberships with pre-treatment controls
Direct democracy =1
-159.207**
-220.557**
-95.335**
-216.490*
-161.552**
(65.554)
(104.018)
(47.893)
(110.560)
(62.917)
Observations
14,133
Bandwidth
500
Degree of polynomial in 3
the forcing variable Wit
6,936
6,936
3,302
1,752
250
3
250
2
125
2
63
1
Notes: Standard errors clustered at both the municipality level and the running variable Wit are within parentheses. The forcing variable Wit it is defined as
max{Xit-1, Xi1918} where X is population size. Mean for the indicator of having at least union club is about 0.43 for local governments with
representative democracy near the threshold. * Significant at the 10 percent level, ** Significant at the 5 percent level, *** Significant at the 1 percent level.
Table 8. Estimates from the regression-discontinuity design on the number of memberships by type of association with pre-treatment controls
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
Panel A: The causal effect of direct democracy versus representative democracy on the number of union memberships
Direct democracy = 1
-77.125**
(39.091)
-136.516*
(77.099)
-73.290**
(36.888)
-133.590*
(79.782)
-97.501**
(43.513)
Panel B: The causal effect of direct democracy versus representative democracy on the number of free church memberships
Direct democracy = 1
-18.088
(11.245)
-23.598
(16.857)
-16.383
(11.216)
-36.476*
(19.842)
-30.314**
(13.489)
Panel C: The causal effect of direct democracy versus representative democracy on the number of temperance lodge memberships
Direct democracy =1
-10.640
(16.221)
-41.180
(26.652)
-11.001
(15.374)
-21.257
(23.899)
-27.427
(20.851)
Observations
14,153
6,946
6,946
3,307
1,755
250
3
250
2
125
2
63
1
Bandwidth
500
Degree of polynomial in 3
the forcing variable Wit
Notes: Standard errors clustered at both the municipality level and the running variable Wit are within parentheses. The forcing variable Wit it is defined as
max{Xit-1, Xi1918} where X is population size. Mean for the indicator of having at least union club is about 0.43 for local governments with
representative democracy near the threshold. * Significant at the 10 percent level, ** Significant at the 5 percent level, *** Significant at the 1 percent level.
Figure 1. The “first-stage” relationship between direct democracy and the forcing variable
1
Direct_democracy
.8
.6
.4
.2
0
-500
0
500
Figure 2. The reduced form relationship between the total number of members in the popular
movement and the forcing variable
180
160
Nr of members
140
120
100
80
60
-500
0
500
Figure 3. The reduced form relationship between turnout and the forcing variable
Turnout in percent of eligible voters
.5
.4
.3
.2
.1
-500
0
500
Figure 4. The McCrary density test
.0005
.0004
.0003
.0002
.0001
1000
1200
1400
1600
Population t-1
Notes: Estimation based on full data using McCrary (2008) test.
1800
2000