I do find these patterns when I look at a few different types of policies (referendums, legislation, state vs. Congress, U.S. vs. international), so there’s some reason to think it’s not just state referendums.
There’s a paper on the repeals of executive orders that finds an even lower rate of repeals there, but that doesn’t tell us the counterfactual (i.e., would someone else have done this if the president in question did not).
There’s suggestive evidence that when policies are more negotiable, there’s less persistence. In my narrative/case study look at Congress, I find that failed policies often pass in a weaker form later on. There’s a similar result for taxes.
So my guess would be there is a somewhat qualitatively similar pattern here, but there’s probably a somewhat greater chance of winding up with a weaker form of the regulation you want later on than there is for failed referendum policies.
Sorry if I missed this in your post, but how many policies did you analyse that were passed via referendum vs. by legislation? How many at the state level vs. federal US vs. international?
Nice work. Do you have an intuitions about whether the same patterns also apply to federal regulations in the US?
A few things:
I do find these patterns when I look at a few different types of policies (referendums, legislation, state vs. Congress, U.S. vs. international), so there’s some reason to think it’s not just state referendums.
There’s a paper on the repeals of executive orders that finds an even lower rate of repeals there, but that doesn’t tell us the counterfactual (i.e., would someone else have done this if the president in question did not).
There’s suggestive evidence that when policies are more negotiable, there’s less persistence. In my narrative/case study look at Congress, I find that failed policies often pass in a weaker form later on. There’s a similar result for taxes.
So my guess would be there is a somewhat qualitatively similar pattern here, but there’s probably a somewhat greater chance of winding up with a weaker form of the regulation you want later on than there is for failed referendum policies.
Sorry if I missed this in your post, but how many policies did you analyse that were passed via referendum vs. by legislation? How many at the state level vs. federal US vs. international?