I interpreted this in the same way as you. Presumably the referendum will lead to a short-term uptick in popular interest, but maybe our model could be that there is some baseline ‘interestingness’ of an issue that public interest reverts to soon after the referendum? It perhaps depends on what the process for getting something on a referendum is. If it is hard and requires very many people to already endorse the proposed policy, then almost by definition referendums aren’t very neglected. But if a few actors can get a referendum, then the topic may still be quite neglected.
Yeah, Jack, I think you’re capturing my thinking here (which is an informal point for this audience rather than something formal in the paper). I look at measures of how much people were interested in a policy well before the referendum or how much we should expect them to be interested after the referendum. It looks like both of these predict less persistence. So the thought is that things that generally are less salient when not on the ballot are more persistent.
I interpreted this in the same way as you. Presumably the referendum will lead to a short-term uptick in popular interest, but maybe our model could be that there is some baseline ‘interestingness’ of an issue that public interest reverts to soon after the referendum? It perhaps depends on what the process for getting something on a referendum is. If it is hard and requires very many people to already endorse the proposed policy, then almost by definition referendums aren’t very neglected. But if a few actors can get a referendum, then the topic may still be quite neglected.
Yeah, Jack, I think you’re capturing my thinking here (which is an informal point for this audience rather than something formal in the paper). I look at measures of how much people were interested in a policy well before the referendum or how much we should expect them to be interested after the referendum. It looks like both of these predict less persistence. So the thought is that things that generally are less salient when not on the ballot are more persistent.