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Do minorities fare worse under direct democracy than under representative democracy? We provide new evidence by studying naturalization requests of immigrants in Switzerland, which were typically decided at the municipal level in citizens' assemblies. Using panel data from 1,400 municipalities for the 1991--2009 period, we exploit recent Federal co...
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... Meanwhile, such a discussion may lack the incentives of checks and balances that lead to legislators 'hearing the other side'. Indeed, as the 2008 Swiss referendum on minarets, recurrent Swiss referendums on immigration and residence of foreign criminals, and California Proposition 8 illustrate (Frey and Goette, 1998;Hainmueller and Hangartner, 2019;Moeckli, 2011), such exercises of popular democracy may allow minority rights to be abrogated by tyrannous majorities. Some such checks might be incorporated into the referendum processfor example, it might be necessary to have a threshold for the turnout of over 50% and/or to achieve a super majority if the measure is to pass. ...
The UK's political constitution rests on the checking and balancing operations of a representative system in which parliament is sovereign. By contrast, referendums are often considered instances of popular sovereignty. Critics condemn them as populist appeals to a singular will of the people that risk majority tyranny, supporters believe they allow citizens to check and balance the elitism of politicians. Such arguments lay behind the criticism and praise of the Brexit referendum. This article argues that while the criticism is justified when referendums form an alternative to representative democracy, they can usefully supplement such a system provided they are embedded within and constrained by it. So conceived, the Brexit referendum can be regarded as consistent with political constitutionalism. Yet, this conception challenges claims that it represented the sovereign will of the people. The result remained subject to ratification by a sovereign parliament and could be legitimately overturned by that body.
... The strong association between nativist attitudes and political discontent has been interpreted as evidence that nativists feel betrayed by political elites, especially in countries with a longstanding history of immigration (McLaren 2012(McLaren , 2015. And research shows that, in practice, direct democracy leads to more nativist policy outcomes that hurt immigrant minorities -at least in Switzerland (Hainmueller and Hangartner 2019). Hence, H3. ...
Do nativists differ from other citizens in their attitudes towards democracy? In this article it is demonstrated that nativism goes hand in hand with preferences for a type of democracy where the interests of the natives should prevail, even at the cost of diminished minority rights, checks and balances, and other constraints on executive power. Liberal representative democracy is not for nativists. It is also shown that nativists seem to believe that the end justifies the means when it comes to different forms of decision making, and that this opportunistic trait usually translates into support for more direct democracy and scepticism towards representative democracy, because nativists tend to believe that they are in the majority (even if they are not). This article concludes that this tendency may in fact be a blessing of sorts, as it keeps nativists from supporting alternatives to democracy.
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2021.2007459 .
... The article first discussed actual experiences with a referendum for minority issues. Hainmueller and Hangartner's (2015) investigation of the Swiss experience compared decisions made by citizens in local referendums and politicians in the municipal councils, finding a 60 per cent difference in the outcomes of immigrants' naturalization applications. In addition to polarization of the issue, enabling citizens to conceal voting in referendums obviously leads to ethnic discrimination and has a dramatic impact on entry policies. ...
Refugee settlement in local communities is often controversial and raises questions of legitimate regulation of access and sustainable integration. This study takes the citizens’ perspective and asks who should determine refugee settlement—the people in a local referendum, political representatives in the local council, or elites in central government—as well as enquiring how immigration scepticism affects preferences for the decision-making venue. The issue speaks to the wealth of literature focusing on ‘the local dimension’ of immigration. The data are from opinion surveys in four Norwegian cities that have experienced extensive refugee settlement during the past few decades. Contrary to expectations, it appears that despite widespread concern about the consequences of newcomers, most trust the decisions made by their local representatives in the city council and prefer the state to enforce refugee settlement at the local level. As expected, those with negative images of refugees, those with a low level of education, and those with rightist party sympathies tend to support a referendum. More surprisingly, a high level of concern for ‘the others’ substantially reduces the general positive effects of social background and political orientation: the worried among the well-educated and left-wingers join forces with the right-wingers and politically alienated in supporting referendums as a channel for influencing the settlement issue. This article suggests that the refugee settlement issue is too controversial to be solved by direct democracy and is also a potential channel for those fearing ‘the others’ across social strata.
... In comparison, the equivalence test rejects inequivalence (hence, declaring equivalence) when a inconsequential confounder is at present; as the confounder becomes more influential (e.g. 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 Year Municipality Direct Democracy Indirect Democracy Note: The above figure plots the treatment status for the first 50 units using data from Hainmueller and Hangartner (2015). The pattern of treatment assignment follows staggered adoption. ...
... The above figure shows the results from applying FEct to data fromHainmueller and Hangartner (2015), who investigate the effect of decisions made by municipal councilors (vs. popular referendums) on naturalization rates of immigrant minorities in Swiss municipalities. ...
This paper introduces a unified framework of counterfactual estimation for time-series cross-sectional data, which estimates the average treatment effect on the treated by directly imputing treated counterfactuals. Examples include the fixed effects counterfactual estimator, interactive fixed effects counterfactual estimator, and matrix completion estimator. These estimators provide more reliable causal estimates than conventional twoway fixed effects models when treatment effects are heterogeneous or unobserved time-varying confounders exist. Under this framework, we propose a new dynamic treatment effects plot, as well as several diagnostic tests, to help researchers gauge the validity of the identifying assumptions. We illustrate these methods with two political economy examples and develop an open-source package, fect, in both R and Stata to facilitate implementation.
... 4 For a related discussion about female enfranchisement, see Koukal and Eichenberger (2017). The role of the increasing costs of power-sharing under direct democracy goes beyond the traditional explanations of the discriminatory role of direct democracy for minority rights (Gamble, 1997;Donovan and Bowler, 1998;Haider-Markel et al., 2007;Hainmueller and Hangartner, 2019). 5 We make use of a much richer dataset with all cantonal votes in Switzerland, while Stutzer and Slotwinski (2020) focus on two cantons (Grisons and Zurich). ...
... Hainmueller and Hangartner (2013) provide evidence for the country of origin of the applicant being the most important determinant of naturalization decisions in Swiss municipalities. Moreover, once politicians rather than citizens decide on the naturalization applications, naturalization rates increased by about 60 percent (Hainmueller and Hangartner, 2019). Therefore, direct democracy might constitute a significant barrier to the broader integration of non-citizen residents in politics, either because it raises the price of political power-sharing or because it fosters the discrimination of minorities (Gamble, 1997;Donovan and Bowler, 1998;Haider-Markel et al., 2007;Koukal and Eichenberger, 2017;Hainmueller and Hangartner, 2019). ...
... Moreover, once politicians rather than citizens decide on the naturalization applications, naturalization rates increased by about 60 percent (Hainmueller and Hangartner, 2019). Therefore, direct democracy might constitute a significant barrier to the broader integration of non-citizen residents in politics, either because it raises the price of political power-sharing or because it fosters the discrimination of minorities (Gamble, 1997;Donovan and Bowler, 1998;Haider-Markel et al., 2007;Koukal and Eichenberger, 2017;Hainmueller and Hangartner, 2019). ...
Universal suffrage is a core element of democracy. However, in many democratic countries, a large part of the inhabitants are foreigners without suffrage. We analyze the conditions under which domestic citizens are willing to extend suffrage to non-citizen residents. This paper explores a new panel dataset (1992–2016) of Swiss referenda on the enfranchisement of non-citizens. We concentrate on the size and composition of the foreign population and the institutional context as determinants of non-citizens’ enfranchisement. Our estimates show that a higher share of foreigners corresponds to a lower willingness of natives to enfranchise non-citizens. This effect seems to be driven by the cost of enfranchising non-citizens, which increases in the cultural distance between the foreign and native population and the strength of direct democracy.
... Given that referendums lead to outcomes endorsed by the majority of citizens, the welfare of minorities or citizens with minority views is potentially undermined by greater use of these instruments. Previous research from Switzerland (Christmann and Danaci 2012;Hainmueller and Hangartner 2015) and the USA (Lewis 2011) demonstrates that referendums and initiatives can have a negative impact on minority rights. In Switzerland, voters decided on referendums banning the construction Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. ...
Using data from the 2012 European Social Survey (ESS) and the 2017 Polpart survey we compare public support for the use of referendums in Switzerland, the Netherlands, the UK, and Hungary before and after the referendums on Mass Immigration (2014), EU–Ukraine Relations (2016), Brexit (2016), and the EU Migrant Quota (2016). We show that overall referendum support declined between 2012 and 2017 in all countries, but especially the Netherlands where the government openly challenged the merits of direct democracy. We also provide evidence that referendum support became more strongly linked to the so-called losers of modernization (i.e. politically dissatisfied, socio-economically disadvantaged, or anti-immigration individuals) in all countries except Switzerland. However, changes in the determinants of referendum support are driven by a decline in support among the winners of modernization (i.e. politically satisfied, socio-economically advantaged, and pro-immigration individuals) rather than an increase in support among the losers whose attitudes stayed more or less the same. Furthermore, we argue that the association between attitudes towards government and referendum support differs between contexts where referendums are government-initiated versus government-challenging.
... Hierfür muss auf die von der Aufnahmegesellschaft als relevant angesehenen Kriterien Bezug genommen werden. Da Teile der Mehrheitsgesellschaft Personen mit bestimmten Nationalitäten oder Religionen eine grössere Schwierigkeit der Integration attribuieren (Hainmueller und Hangartner 2013;Cheng 2015), sollten diese Aspekte hier auch berücksichtigt werden. ...
... religiöse Orientierung negativ darauf wirkt, als wie gelungen ihre Integration betrachtet wird. Dieses Ergebnis ist kongruent mit anderen wissenschaftlichen Befunden für die Schweiz, welche zeigen, dass Personen mit diesen Merkmalen eine schlechtere Integration unterstellt wird (Hainmueller und Hangartner 2013;Cheng 2015). Zuletzt zeigen die Ergebnisse der Studie, dass die Integration der Migranten insgesamt niedriger bewertet wird, wenn die Befragten dem Thema Zuwanderung negativ gegenüberstehen. ...
This contribution examines the relevance of the cultural, social and structural dimension of integration for the total perception of integration of migrants by the population of Switzerland. By means of a vignette study we show in our model that language ability as an aspect of cultural integration is the strongest determinant for a positive perception of integration. Second is the social integration as measured by the participation in associations, followed by the structural integration. Nationality and religion have only little relevance.
... When governments decide to pursue integration policies, they are often targets of electoral backlash and lose their majority to xenophobic parties (Sniderman et al., 2007;Marbach, 2020). On the other hand, giving voters the power to decide which migrants should be granted citizenship has produced lower naturalization rates and substantial discrimination (Hainmueller and Hangartner, 2019). The tension between the benefits of integration and its electoral costs makes the need to identify policies that promote integration without creating political backlash a first order priority. ...
Groups competing with the state, from insurgents to criminal organizations, are widely believed to emerge in weak states unable to provide protection to their citizens. This dissertation considers a common but less investigated phenomenon: criminal groups often expand to states with strong economies and institutions. How do they manage to expand? Which policies can states adopt to fight against them? My first paper proposes a theory of expansion. I argue that criminal organizations expand by striking agreements with political and economic actors facing competition and to which they can offer critical resources to gain an edge over competitors. I test two predictions of the theory in the context of move of Southern-Italian mafias to the North. First, I show that increases in market competition (due to a construction boom) and in mafias’ capacity to offer cheap illegal labor (by exploiting migrants from mafia-controlled areas in the south) allowed criminal groups to expand. Second, I find that parties in agreements with criminals gained a persistent electoral advantage in mafia-infiltrated cities. This chapter suggests that criminal groups leveraged fragile categories and deals with political and economic actors in strong states to expand. In my second paper, I show that a similar strategy allows them to thrive. I study the effects of a campaign providing migrants in agriculture with the tools to denounce labor exploitation. I find that the campaign increased both police reporting of exploitation and prosecution of criminal organizations, often responsible for smuggling and controlling migrants. This suggests that fighting migrants' exploitation directly damages criminal groups. My third paper studies another non-violent method to fight organized crime: targeting their revenues. We study an Italian policy fighting mafia-misappropriation of public funds and find that criminals strategically react by displacing their activity where the policy does not enforce investigations, underscoring the importance to design anti-mafia policies that anticipate criminal groups' sophistication. My dissertation highlights the need to re-conceptualize criminal organizations not only as substitutes for weak states, but also as complements to states with strong institutions and considers policies to fight them based on understanding the strategies they use to persist in strong states.
... Our data combine detailed records from referendums and leaflets that we extracted from municipal archives to identify all 4160 immigrants whose naturalization applications were decided in the 46 municipalities that used the secret ballot referendum process between 1970 and 2003 (30). From these records, we observe the number of yes and no votes that each applicant received and the information available to voters from the leaflets when they voted in the referendums, including the applicant's name, birth year, gender, referendum year, and origin country. ...
... For the subset of applicants who obtain Swiss citizenship if and only if they pass their first referendum, we could estimate the effect of citizenship, i.e., a local average treatment effect (LATE), if we made additional assumptions-notably, an exclusion restrictionand obtained a reliable measure of when and if rejected applicants naturalize so that we could compute a compliance ratio. Note that under these assumptions, the LATE would be strictly larger than the intentionto-treat effect that we report here (32); hence, our results can be viewed Earnings before naturalization referendum 30 Years before/after naturalization referendum as a lower bound on the effect of citizenship. In the Supplementary Materials, we provide approximations to the LATE by leveraging data from a targeted survey of close referendum winners and losers and the CCO's indicator for naturalization, which is unfortunately not updated regularly, to measure whether and when rejected applicants naturalized. ...
... Standard Swiss practice is for citizenship applications to be decided at the municipal level, with procedures for resolving applications varying across municipalities (30,31). Immigrants seeking Swiss citizenship apply with their municipality of residence. ...
We provide evidence that citizenship catalyzes the long-term economic integration of immigrants. Despite the relevance of citizenship policy to immigrant integration, we lack a reliable understanding of the economic consequences of acquiring citizenship. To overcome nonrandom selection into naturalization, we exploit the quasi-random assignment of citizenship in Swiss municipalities that held referendums to decide the outcome of individual naturalization applications. Our data combine individual-level referendum results with detailed social security records from the Swiss authorities. This approach allows us to compare the long-term earnings of otherwise similar immigrants who barely won or lost their referendum. We find that winning Swiss citizenship in the referendum increased annual earnings by an average of approximately 5000 U.S. dollars over the subsequent 15 years. This effect is concentrated among more marginalized immigrants.
... The term "immigrant minorities" also allows a distinction from "national minorities", who are ethnic groups who have lived in these European countries for centuries (for example Roma and Hungarians in Romania, Danes and Sorbs in Germany, Sami in the Nordic countries, Bascs in Spain and so forth). For texts using the term, see De Vroome, Hooghe, and Marien (2013), Dowley and Silver (2011), Geedes (1995), Hainmueller and Hangartner (2012), Schaeffer, Höhne, and Teney (2016), Schmitter (1983), Sniderman, Hagendoorn, and Prior (2004). ...
Abstract This article discusses the possibilities and constraints of designing an identical or at least comparable sampling strategy across different European countries. It is based on expert reviews from six European Union member states that discuss the possibilities of sampling migrants in their respective countries. The country sample includes two countries from Northern Europe (Sweden, Denmark), two from Continental Europe (Germany, The Netherlands), and two from Southern Europe (Spain, Italy). After a discussion of various definitions of the target population and an overview of existing strategies to sample them, it is investigated which of them can be used in the six countries analyzed in the expert reviews. The focus is on probability samples and the use of population registers, while other sampling strategies are only briefly touched upon. The analysis shows that even with only six European countries an identical register-based sampling design is difficult. The authors propose that, by focusing on sampling immigrants in cities, researchers can better implement sampling strategies which result in comparable samples.
