The Electoral Returns of Party-Sponsored Citizen Legislative Initiatives

Increasingly, parties sponsor citizen legislative initiatives to raise the salience of issues they own, mobilize supporters, or attract new voters. While the literature focusing on this phenomenon frequently cites electoral motivations, evidence that such strategies result in electoral gains is lacking. Our case study explores this gap by focusing on a citizen legislative initiative sponsored by the Save Romania Union (USR), as part of their antiestablishment appeal. We leverage the assignment of signature collection points across the country to causally identify the electoral impact of this citizen initiative. Our matched difference-in-differences design corroborates the positive impact of the initiative on the party’s results at the 2019 European Parliament elections and the 2020 parliamentary elections and illustrates how this is likely driven by a mobilization effect. Additional analyses show that the share of citizens signing the initiative in each locality is a strong predictor of the USR vote.