Does Direct Democracy Hurt Immigrant Minorities? Evidence from Naturalization Decisions in Switzerland

Abstract

Do minorities fare worse under direct democracy than under representative democracy? We provide new evidence by studying naturalization requests of immigrants in Switzerland that were typically decided with referendums in each municipality. Using panel data from about 1,400 municipalities for the 1991–2009 period, we exploit Federal Court rulings that forced municipalities to transfer the decisions to their elected municipality councils. We find that naturalization rates surged by about 60% once politicians rather than citizens began deciding on naturalization applications. Whereas voters in referendums face no cost of arbitrarily rejecting qualified applicants based on discriminatory preferences, politicians in the council are constrained to formally justify rejections and may be held accountable by judicial review. Consistent with this mechanism, the increase in naturalization rates caused by switching from direct to representative democracy is much stronger for more marginalized immigrant groups and in areas where voters are more xenophobic or where judicial review is more salient.

The Effect of Citizenship on the Long-Term Earnings of Marginalized Immigrants: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Switzerland

“…Standard Swiss practice is for citizenship applications to be decided at the municipal level, with procedures for resolving applications varying across municipalities (27,32). Immigrants who…”

“…We base our sample on data collected by (32). They retrieved records of referendums and leaflet information from municipal archives for all immigrants whose naturalization applications were put to public vote in all 46 ballot-box municipalities between 1970 and 2003, when the Swiss Supreme Court struck down the procedure as unconstitutional (27). In total, our sample from the municipal archives contains N = 4, 160 applicants.…”

“…Our data combines detailed records from referendums and leaflets that we extracted from municipal archives to identify all 4,160 immigrants whose naturalization applications were decided in the 46 municipalities that used the secret ballot referendum process between 1970 and 2003 (27). From these records, we observe the number of "yes" and "no" votes 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.…”

Direct democracy and resource allocation: Experimental evidence from Afghanistan

“…Research on direct democracy has examined effects on the size of government (Matsusaka 1995;Funk and Gathmann, 2011), political participation and redistributive spending (Hinnerich and Pettersson-Lidbom, 2010), discriminatory local policies (Hainmueller and Hangartner, 2015), and happiness (Frey and Stutzer, 2005). Using experimental variations similar to those employed in this study, Olken (2010) finds a strong positive effect of the use of direct democracy in Indonesia on villagers' satisfaction, but no effect on the choice of the general project itself, other than a relocation effect of women's projects towards poorer areas.…”

Direct Democracy and Women's Political Engagement

“…Finally, this article provides a new theoretical perspective on the relationship between direct democracy and marginalized groups. Some empirical studies have shown that direct democratic procedures tend to produce outcomes that are systematically biased against the interests of socially marginalized groups, such as racial and ethnic minorities (Gamble ; Hainmueller and Hangartner ; Hajnal ). My study indicates that opportunities and experience under direct democracy may create some positive behavioral implications for marginalized groups.…”