Ready to Reform: How Popular Initiatives Can Be Successful

We study whether the number of signatures collected to qualify a popular initiative affects the probability of reforming the status quo. The initiative process is modeled as a sequential game under uncertainty: petitioners make an entry decision and collect signatures to qualify the initiative. Politicians decide about a political compromise - a counter proposal - after which petitioners have the option to withdraw the initiative before the vote. In equilibrium, politicians infer the initiative's popularity from the number of signatures and collection time. The more the initiative is perceived as a threat to the status quo, the more likely politicians come up with a counter proposal. Under certain conditions, petitioners have the incentive to collect more signatures than required for qualification to demonstrate high success probability. We test model predictions using the data set of all Swiss constitutional initiatives at federal level between 1891 and 2010. Overall, we find supporting evidence for the model mechanisms. Fast signature collection is associated with a higher probability of changing the status quo. The reason is that initiatives collecting signatures quickly are more likely to provoke a compromise than slow collectors. Ultimately, counter proposal are key to amending the status quo. Interestingly, we find that restricting signature collection time and increasing the signature requirement, reduces the informative mechanism of the signature collection process considerably.