Institutional Design and the Use of Direct Democracy: Evidence from the German Lander

Despite growing interest in direct democratic institutions, the empirical evidence on the relationship between institutional design and the actual use of popular rights remains rather sparse. The authors use a novel data set on institutional openness and test its link to the number of popular initiatives in the German Lander for the period of 1997-2005. Their empirical analysis reveals a strong and robust negative effect of higher institutional requirements on the number of popular initiatives in the 16 German Lander; whereas other factors appear to be of minor importance. They thus come to the conclusion that the comparatively high institutional hurdles in the Lander impose costs of initiation, thereby limiting the number of popular initiatives.