Levels of Education and Support for Direct Democracy

Abstract

Conventional wisdom based on public opinion surveys suggests that voters are generally supportive of direct democracy. Recent research has shown that perhaps public support for direct democracy may not be as strong as is traditionally thought. Given this, I hypothesize that voters without a college degree are less supportive of direct democracy once asked how they will vote on a series of ballot initiative questions in the context of a survey. Voters with a college degree will not be affected by these questions in their evaluations of direct democracy because they have more confidence in their ability to participate in politics. I conduct a split sample survey experiment to investigate opinions toward direct democracy. The results confirm that, when exposed to ballot initiative questions, voters without a college degree are less supportive of direct democracy compared to college graduates. Implications are discussed.