Taking Cues from the Government: Heuristic versus Systematic Processing in a Constitutional Referendum

Abstract

One of the main criticisms of direct democracy is that it places excessive demands on voters. Are citizens competent enough to vote directly on policy issues? When stakes are high, do citizens mainly follow elites’ signals or do they decide in line with their issue preferences? This article addresses these questions in a multi-method setting by combining observational and experimental data from an original three-wave panel survey conducted during the 2016 Italian constitutional referendum. In particular, Finite Mixture Models are employed to model voters’ heterogeneous strategies of information processing. Findings show that heuristic voting based on government evaluation prevails over policy-related voting. More specifically, less politically sophisticated and partisan voters relied on government assessment as a heuristic, while sophisticated and independent voters based their decisions mostly on their assessment of the reform. Implications for the question of citizens’ competence in direct democracy are discussed.

Citizens’ response to a non-responsive government: the case of the Swiss Initiative on Mass Immigration

“…First, citizens may follow the position of their preferred political party. Political parties provide cues to their voters that can use them as decision heuristic (Colombo 2016, Colombo 2018De Angelis et al 2020;Kleider and Stoeckel 2019;Kriesi 2005;Morisi et al 2021;Pannico 2017;Pannico 2020;Steenbergen et al 2007; see also Boudreau and MacKenzie 2014;Lupia and Matsusaka 2004). This can be a case of 'cold cognition' where citizens use a heuristic to take decisions that they believe to be in their interest.…”