Ballot Initiatives and the Democratic Citizen

The second paper from the study, called "Ballot Initiatives and the Democratic Citizen", published in The Journal of Politics (2002). This paper draws on participatory democratic theory to identify the circumstances under which ballot initiatives will and will not create a more educated citizenry. The evidence indicates that exposure to initiatives must recur over several elections to instigate a chain of reactions leading to more knowledgeable citizens. Moreover, only those participating in initiatives through voting gain the beneficial effects, as non-voters in the same states see no increases. ary spending. Rather, the U.S.