Very interesting. 1. Did you notice an effect of how large/ambitious the ballot initiative was? I remember previous research suggesting consecutive piecemeal initiatives were more successful at creating larger change than singular large ballot initiatives.
2. Do you know how much the results vary by state?
3. How different do ballot initiatives need to be for the huge first advocacy effect to take place? Does this work as long as the policies are not identical or is it more of a cause specific function or something in between? Does it have a smooth gradient or is it discontinuous after some tipping point?
I look at some things you might find relevant here. I try to measure the scale of the impact of a referendum. I do this two ways. I have just a subjective judgment on a five-point scale, and then I also look at predictions of the referendum’s fiscal impact from the secretary of state. Neither one is predictive. I also look at how many people would be directly affected by a referendum and how much news coverage there was before the election cycle. These predict less persistence.
This is something I plan to do more, but they can’t vary that much because when I look at variables that vary across states (e.g., requirements to get on the ballot), I don’t see much of a difference.
I’m not totally sure what your question is, but I think you might be interpreting my results as saying that close referendums are especially persistent. I’m only focusing on close referendums because it’s a natural experiment—I’m not saying there’s something special about them otherwise. I’m just estimating the effect of passing a marginal referendum on whether the policy is in place later on. I can try to think about whether this holds for things that are not close by looking at states with supermajority requirements or by looking at legislation, and it looks like things are similar when they’re not as close.
Interesting. Are there any examples of what we might consider a relatively small policy changes that received huge amounts of coverage? Like for something people normally wouldn’t care about. Maybe these would be informative to look at compared to more hot button issues like abortion that tend to get a lot of coverage. I’m also curious if any big issues somehow got less attention than expected and how this looks for pass/fail margins compared to other states where they got more attention. There are probably some ways to estimate this that are better than others.
I see.
I was interpreting it as “a referendum increases the likelihood of the policy existing later.” My question is about the assumptions that lead to this view and the idea that it might be more effective to run a campaign for a policy ballot initiative once and never again. Is this estimate of the referendum effect only for the exact same policy (maybe an education tax but the percent is slightly higher or lower) or similar policies (a fee or a subsidy or voucher or something even more different)? How similar do they have to be? What is the most different policy that existed later that you think would still count?
“Something relevant to EAs that I don’t focus on in the paper is how to think about the effect of campaigning for a policy given that I focus on the effect of passing one conditional on its being proposed. It turns out there’s a method (Cellini et al. 2010) for backing this out if we assume that the effect of passing a referendum on whether the policy is in place later is the same on your first try is the same as on your Nth try. Using this method yields an estimate of the effect of running a successful campaign on later policy of around 60% (Appendix Figure D20).
Very interesting.
1. Did you notice an effect of how large/ambitious the ballot initiative was? I remember previous research suggesting consecutive piecemeal initiatives were more successful at creating larger change than singular large ballot initiatives.
2. Do you know how much the results vary by state?
3. How different do ballot initiatives need to be for the huge first advocacy effect to take place? Does this work as long as the policies are not identical or is it more of a cause specific function or something in between? Does it have a smooth gradient or is it discontinuous after some tipping point?
I look at some things you might find relevant here. I try to measure the scale of the impact of a referendum. I do this two ways. I have just a subjective judgment on a five-point scale, and then I also look at predictions of the referendum’s fiscal impact from the secretary of state. Neither one is predictive. I also look at how many people would be directly affected by a referendum and how much news coverage there was before the election cycle. These predict less persistence.
This is something I plan to do more, but they can’t vary that much because when I look at variables that vary across states (e.g., requirements to get on the ballot), I don’t see much of a difference.
I’m not totally sure what your question is, but I think you might be interpreting my results as saying that close referendums are especially persistent. I’m only focusing on close referendums because it’s a natural experiment—I’m not saying there’s something special about them otherwise. I’m just estimating the effect of passing a marginal referendum on whether the policy is in place later on. I can try to think about whether this holds for things that are not close by looking at states with supermajority requirements or by looking at legislation, and it looks like things are similar when they’re not as close.
Interesting. Are there any examples of what we might consider a relatively small policy changes that received huge amounts of coverage? Like for something people normally wouldn’t care about. Maybe these would be informative to look at compared to more hot button issues like abortion that tend to get a lot of coverage. I’m also curious if any big issues somehow got less attention than expected and how this looks for pass/fail margins compared to other states where they got more attention. There are probably some ways to estimate this that are better than others.
I see.
I was interpreting it as “a referendum increases the likelihood of the policy existing later.” My question is about the assumptions that lead to this view and the idea that it might be more effective to run a campaign for a policy ballot initiative once and never again. Is this estimate of the referendum effect only for the exact same policy (maybe an education tax but the percent is slightly higher or lower) or similar policies (a fee or a subsidy or voucher or something even more different)? How similar do they have to be? What is the most different policy that existed later that you think would still count?