The Impact of Direct Democracy on Society - Universität St.Gallen

– 18 –placing new (proposed) laws on the political agenda or for revising or eliminating alreadyexisting laws 33 . Other important institutions <strong>of</strong> direct legislation are the constitutionalinitiative and the statutory referendum 34 . Chapter II <strong>of</strong> this dissertation describes in moredetail the form that these four institutions take in the 26 cantons, how they have changed overrecent years, and how they can be used to construct a measure <strong>of</strong> direct democracy for use inthe subsequent analyses.4 Structure <strong>of</strong> the Dissertation<strong>The</strong> rest <strong>of</strong> this dissertation is organized as follows. <strong>The</strong> second chapter outlines and discussesin detail the development <strong>of</strong> important institutions <strong>of</strong> direct legislation between 1997 and2003. <strong>The</strong> goal <strong>of</strong> this chapter is to provide a basis for an update <strong>of</strong> the composite index <strong>of</strong>direct democracy, which became necessary to carry out the empirical analyses presented inthe subsequent chapters. <strong>The</strong> third chapter presents an analysis <strong>of</strong> the impact <strong>of</strong> directdemocracy on individual well-being using a cross section <strong>of</strong> 1992 data and Swiss HouseholdPanel data from 2000 to 2002. Chapter IV analyzes the impact <strong>of</strong> direct democracy on theefficiency <strong>of</strong> redistribution. <strong>The</strong> fifth chapter is dedicated to the question <strong>of</strong> how directlegislation affects levels <strong>of</strong> property crime, hate crime, and sexual <strong>of</strong>fenses. Chapter VIpresents an investigation into the impact <strong>of</strong> direct legislation on educational quality asmeasured by PISA-like test scores. <strong>The</strong>se empirical chapters are structured like scientificpapers and have already been presented as separate papers at various conferences; for thisreason the reader might find some overlapping in the arguments presented. Finally, chapterVII concludes with a short summary and evaluation <strong>of</strong> the findings <strong>of</strong> this dissertation.33 <strong>The</strong> constitutional initiative aims at changing, eliminating, or adding a new constitutional law. Usually, therequirements for this initiative are the same as those for the statutory one, so that in econometric analyses theimpact <strong>of</strong> the two cannot be distinguished. See also chapter II.34 In some cantons, even more specialized forms <strong>of</strong> referenda exist, such as those on highway expenditure orinternational treaties. See chapter II and TRECHSEL and SERDÜLT (1999) for more information.