This paper draws on Swiss direct democracy to review the Swiss experience with immigration, which has been shaped strongly by regular voting on immigration policies. Relying on two unique post-vote data-sets on how Swiss citizens voted on initiatives directed at containing the proportion of foreigners in the population, we improve on past empirical evidence by by-passing the problem of "hypothetical bias" present in the analysis of conventional survey data. Controlling for the participation bias due to non-mandatory voting, we find evidence that the hypothetical bias hampering pre-vote surveys may be large but that turnout does not have a decisive influence on the outcome of a vote. Confirming political-economy predictions, education matters in the shaping of immigration preferences but non-economic arguments also play an important role.
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Volume (Year): 24 (2008) Issue (Month): 3 (September) Pages: 628-641 Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML
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