TY  - JOUR
AU  - Figueiredo,John M. de
AU  - Ji,Chang Ho
AU  - Kousser,Thad
TI  - Financing Direct Democracy: Revisiting the Research on Campaign Spending and Citizen Initiatives
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 16356
PY  - 2010
Y2  - September 2010
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w16356
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w16356.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
John M. de Figueiredo
The Law School and Fuqua School
Duke University
210 Science Drive, Box 90360
Durham, NC 27708
Tel: 919-613-8513
E-Mail: jdefig@law.duke.edu

Chang Ho Ji
La Sierra University
School of Education
4500 Riverwalk Parkway
Riverside, CA 92515
E-Mail: cji@lasierra.edu

Thad Kousser
UCSD
Department of Political Science SSB369
9500 Gilman Drive, #0521
La Jolla, CA 92093-0521 
E-Mail: tkousser@ucsd.edu
AB  - The conventional view in the direct democracy literature is that spending against a measure is more effective than spending in favor of a measure, but the empirical results underlying this conclusion have been questioned by recent research.  We argue that the conventional finding is driven by the endogenous nature of campaign spending: initiative proponents spend more when their ballot measure is likely to fail.  We address this endogeneity by using an instrumental variables approach to analyze a comprehensive dataset of ballot propositions in California from 1976 to 2004.  We find that both support and opposition spending on citizen initiatives have strong, statistically significant, and countervailing effects.  We confirm this finding by looking at time series data from early polling on a subset of these measures.  Both analyses show that spending in favor of citizen initiatives substantially increases their chances of passage, just as opposition spending decreases this likelihood.
ER  -