Parties and the People: Why Do Parties Support Direct Democracy?

During every crisis of representative democracy, there is a surge of demands for more direct forms of participation. Whether it is the populist movement at the end of the 19th century in the US or the Five Star Movement in current-day Italy—discontent with the representative system increases demands for alternative institutions. But what explains the position of the main actors in the formulation of these demands? In this paper, we ask why political parties call for direct democracy. We provide two major motivations: ideology and strategy. Analyzing national party manifestos of European parties from 1946 onward using our novel supervised machine learning classifier (transformer model), we show how ideological and strategic motivations account for most variation in party positions towards direct democracy. From a strategic perspective, we find that challenger parties are the main advocates of direct democracy. Ideologically, it is mainly culturally liberal positions that are positively correlated with support for direct democracy, even after parties have lost the strategic incentives to support it. These results contribute to the literature on institutional origins and sheds light on the motivation of a central political actor, parties, when it comes to the introduction of direct democratic institutions.