Does this study tell us much about the counterfactual advancement of policies that pass the threshold by more significant margins, like a few percentage points or even double digit percentage points? Presumably those are more popular, so more likely to be passed eventually anyway. Some might still be popular but neglected because they aren’t high priorities in politics, though, e.g. animal welfare.
[Edited to add the second sentence of the paragraph beginning, “Putting these together.”]
The primary result doesn’t speak to this, but secondary results can shed some light on it. Overall, I’d guess persistence is a touch less for policies with much more support, but note that the effect of proposing a policy on later policy is likely much larger than the effect of passing a policy conditional on its having been proposed.
The first thing to note is that there are really two questions here we might want to ask:
What is the effect of passing a policy change, conditional on its having been proposed, when its support is not marginal?
What is the effect of proposing a policy change when its support is not marginal?
I’ll speak to (1) first.
The main thing we can do is look at states that require a supermajority to pass a referendum in Appendix Figure E15. This does not directly answer (1) because, while it allows us to look at referendums whose support is well above 50%, it is looking at cases where you need more than 50% to revisit the referendum. Nevertheless, it gives us some information. First, things look similar for the most part. Second, it looks like maybe there’s a higher chance that supermajority referendums pass later on, especially in the first decade, though it’s very noisy statistically. Third, repeal is slightly less common, though this is again noisy and also confounded with the higher difficulty of repealing one of these.
In the latest version of the paper, I include a simulation (Section 5.1) that allows me to simulate some relevant experiments, though these are currently not in the paper. In my simulation, I can simulate the effect of passing an initiative (a referendum by petition) with varying levels of support. It is generally the case that, for policies that get proposed and have support above 55%, persistence is about 25% smaller at 100 years for the reason you give: these policies are more likely to pass eventually. (I do this by simulating a world where, holding voter support constant, I randomly assign policies to be passed or not.)
Putting these together, I think it would be reasonable to think either that the effect of passage is similar for policies with widespread support, or that it is somewhat smaller. You can also look at the discussion of state legislation in section 6, which does not rely on close votes (though plausibly selects for things being marginal by focusing on adoptions of policies by states where similar states lack those policies).
Turning to (2), we should expect the effect of proposing a policy on whether that policy is in effect later on to be much larger than the effect of passing a policy conditional on its being proposed. Appendix Figure E20 (formerly D20) is one attempt to get at this and suggests the effect of successfully proposing a policy is ~50% larger than the effect of passing a proposed one. One could also imagine simulating this—but that exercise requires some unclear assumptions, so I’m inclined to go with Appendix Figure E20 here.*
One underlying theme in all of this is that the people who propose policies are very much in the driver’s seat. Persistence largely appears to be a result of the fact that small numbers of people can set policies based on whether they decide to pursue policy changes or not.
*One could also imagine simulating this, but the problem there is that the vast majority of policies one could conceive of probably have approximately nobody who cares about them (e.g., minor tweaks to the language of some law, declaring that pistachio is the best ice cream flavor and offering an infinitesimal subsidy for it). My calibration has the policies that get proposed as being in the tail of the distribution in terms of how much people care about them. As a result, if we look at policies that don’t get proposed, basically nobody would ever bother trying to repeal or revisit them.
Does this study tell us much about the counterfactual advancement of policies that pass the threshold by more significant margins, like a few percentage points or even double digit percentage points? Presumably those are more popular, so more likely to be passed eventually anyway. Some might still be popular but neglected because they aren’t high priorities in politics, though, e.g. animal welfare.
[Edited to add the second sentence of the paragraph beginning, “Putting these together.”]
The primary result doesn’t speak to this, but secondary results can shed some light on it. Overall, I’d guess persistence is a touch less for policies with much more support, but note that the effect of proposing a policy on later policy is likely much larger than the effect of passing a policy conditional on its having been proposed.
The first thing to note is that there are really two questions here we might want to ask:
What is the effect of passing a policy change, conditional on its having been proposed, when its support is not marginal?
What is the effect of proposing a policy change when its support is not marginal?
I’ll speak to (1) first.
The main thing we can do is look at states that require a supermajority to pass a referendum in Appendix Figure E15. This does not directly answer (1) because, while it allows us to look at referendums whose support is well above 50%, it is looking at cases where you need more than 50% to revisit the referendum. Nevertheless, it gives us some information. First, things look similar for the most part. Second, it looks like maybe there’s a higher chance that supermajority referendums pass later on, especially in the first decade, though it’s very noisy statistically. Third, repeal is slightly less common, though this is again noisy and also confounded with the higher difficulty of repealing one of these.
In the latest version of the paper, I include a simulation (Section 5.1) that allows me to simulate some relevant experiments, though these are currently not in the paper. In my simulation, I can simulate the effect of passing an initiative (a referendum by petition) with varying levels of support. It is generally the case that, for policies that get proposed and have support above 55%, persistence is about 25% smaller at 100 years for the reason you give: these policies are more likely to pass eventually. (I do this by simulating a world where, holding voter support constant, I randomly assign policies to be passed or not.)
Putting these together, I think it would be reasonable to think either that the effect of passage is similar for policies with widespread support, or that it is somewhat smaller. You can also look at the discussion of state legislation in section 6, which does not rely on close votes (though plausibly selects for things being marginal by focusing on adoptions of policies by states where similar states lack those policies).
Turning to (2), we should expect the effect of proposing a policy on whether that policy is in effect later on to be much larger than the effect of passing a policy conditional on its being proposed. Appendix Figure E20 (formerly D20) is one attempt to get at this and suggests the effect of successfully proposing a policy is ~50% larger than the effect of passing a proposed one. One could also imagine simulating this—but that exercise requires some unclear assumptions, so I’m inclined to go with Appendix Figure E20 here.*
One underlying theme in all of this is that the people who propose policies are very much in the driver’s seat. Persistence largely appears to be a result of the fact that small numbers of people can set policies based on whether they decide to pursue policy changes or not.
*One could also imagine simulating this, but the problem there is that the vast majority of policies one could conceive of probably have approximately nobody who cares about them (e.g., minor tweaks to the language of some law, declaring that pistachio is the best ice cream flavor and offering an infinitesimal subsidy for it). My calibration has the policies that get proposed as being in the tail of the distribution in terms of how much people care about them. As a result, if we look at policies that don’t get proposed, basically nobody would ever bother trying to repeal or revisit them.