Determinants of Approval for Citizen-Initiated Ordinance Proposals: An Analysis of Reconstructed Policy Typologies and Fiscal and Political Effects

This study investigates the determinants of the approval for citizen-initiated ordinance proposals by reconstructing policy types and evaluating the effects of fiscal and political variables. We compiled all ordinance initiatives submitted between 2000, when the system was first enforced, and December 31, 2023, across local governments in Korea. The attributes of these ordinances were reclassified using Wilson’s (1986) political cost-benefit framework, and an extended binary logistic regression model was estimated, incorporating political and fiscal factors. The analysis yields three main findings. First, with respect to policy type, proposals classified as the majoritarian type exhibit a significantly higher probability of approval than those categorized as entrepreneurial politics, whereas the expectation that client politics proposals would be more likely to pass than entrepreneurial proposals is not supported. Second, among political factors, higher turnout in local elections, temporal proximity to the local election date, and the local chief executive’s affiliation with a political party all increase the likelihood of the approval; by contrast, partisan congruence between the chief executive and the president is not statistically significant. Third, regarding fiscal factors, a local government’s fiscal capacity per se is not significant; however, ordinances requiring a medium level of fiscal expenditure were less likely to be approved than those requiring lower levels of expenditure. These findings indicate that citizen-initiated ordinances are more likely to succeed when they appeal to broad constituencies and when political mobilization is salient, while fiscal conditions per se are less critical than perceptions of the scope and nature of required expenditures. The study contributes theoretically by operationalizing a coherent logic of policy types, reassessing political variables, and expanding fiscal measures to address limitations in prior research; practically, it provides empirical grounds for evaluating the performance of the citizen ordinance initiative system for the enactment, amendment, and repeal of ordinances, thereby informing the system’s refinement.