Municipality‐Level Outcomes of Direct‐Democratic Votes in Switzerland, 1866–2023

Abstract Switzerland relies heavily on direct‐democratic institutions to decide on a wide range of political issues. Since 1848, more than 600 direct‐democratic votes have taken place at the national level. However, the lack of comprehensive data has limited the systematic use of these votes for research. This paper introduces a new dataset containing municipality‐level outcomes for all direct‐democratic votes from 1866 to 1944, and supplements post‐1945 data to fill gaps in previous collections. Spanning over 150 years, the new dataset contains more than 1.3 million observations. Several empirical illustrations demonstrate the dataset's potential for research.