Direct democracy: A civil duty in Switzerland, and a pipe dream for populists elsewhere in Europe.

Populist parties across Europe have been demanding more direct democracy after the Swiss model. But the people who are supporting these demands have very different reasons for doing so, as a study has now shown. Tina Freyburg is a political scientist at the University of St. Gallen, and she leads a team of researchers who have been analysing survey data from Great Britain, France, Switzerland and Germany. They’ve reached similar conclusions about all four countries: “Overall, we can see that people of a populist inclination are much more in favour of direct democracy than the rest of society”, says Freyburg.

Steffen Mohrenberg from Demoscope and Robert A. Huber of the University of Salzburg were also involved in this study. They differentiate between two groups of people who reject ‘elites’: the real populists and the so-called ‘stealth democrats’. In contrast to the populists, stealth democrats have no great expectations as far as the popular will is concerned, and tend to show less interest in politics. But both groups want better opportunities to have their say directly. Populists see it as an instrument for asserting the will of the people, while stealth democrats primarily see referenda and initiatives as an opportunity to control the elites. “In our study, we were able to differentiate between these two groups for the first-ever time, and achieve the necessary conceptual clarity”, says Tina Freyburg.

The researchers believe it’s important that future studies should deal in depth with the differences and commonalities between the two groups. Up to now, says Freyburg, too little attention has been paid to the boundaries between the stealth democrats and the populists.

S. Mohrenberg et al.: Love at First Sight? Populism and Direct Democracy. SSRN (2019)