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Political Elite Involvement in Initiative and Referendum Elections in the United States

par Wavreille, Marie-Catherine
Président du jury Delwit, Pascal
Promoteur Van Haute, Emilie
Publication Non publié, 2017-12-20

Thèse de doctorat

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Résumé :

This dissertation examines the involvement of political elites in direct legislation contests in the United States. In order to address this objective, this analysis proceeded by asking three questions. The first question addresses the level of political elites’ involvement. Using social media data, Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 of the dissertation focus on the involvement - defined as the endorsement of ballot propositions - of governors and state legislators. Using data extracted from the Twitter or Facebook profiles of 60 governors between 2012 and 2016 revealed that less than 10 percent of all measures were endorsed by state's chief executives. In addition, considering the official voter information guide printed by the Secretary of State, ballot campaign websites, coverage in two newspapers, and social media data shows that about 20 percent of all observations were endorsed by state legislators in at least one of the four platforms. With the aim of explaining the behavior of political elites, the second question asked in this research concerns the conditions that shape the behavior of political elites, and in particular, the involvement of governors and state legislators in direct legislation contests put on statewide ballots in recent years. With that goal in mind, I have built on previous work in direct legislation but also on executive and legislative politics to provide a theoretical framework. This framework emphasizes two general approaches. Policy and strategy are the two answers to the question of “Why do political elites get involved in direct legislation contests?” The analyses provide much support for my proposed general framework that political elites are strategic players, though not without important qualifications and reservations. Lastly, and addressing the consequences of their involvement, the third question asks: Does political elites’ involvement affect candidate elections? I assessed the impact of candidate positioning from two different perspectives. First, I examined aggregate-level voting behavior in California using vote returns from the 2014 elections. I found that Proposition 1, the salient water bond, did not play any role in moving counties to choose the Democratic gubernatorial candidate. Despite the intense campaigning by Governor Jerry Brown in favor of the water bond, the aggregate-level results failed to find any priming effect of the measure on candidate choice. Secondly, using survey data, I examined the effect of two statewide ballot measures on the 2016 ballot in the Golden State and the endorsements of these propositions by two political elites on the vote for president and state senate.