Participatory Democracy: Populism Revived by Joseph F. Zimmerman, Praeger, 1986

Zimmerman provides a comprehensive overview of citizen participation in lawmaking.  He analyses the benefits and costs of citizen participation, the arguments for and against it, and the types of citizen participation in policy making.  He specifically focuses on the initiative, referendum, and recall process, how it varies from state to state, and the legal and political variables hat facilitate or frustrate citizen involvement.

         Who Will Tell The People: The Betrayal of American Democracy by William Greider, A Touchstone Book Published by Simon & Schuster 1993

The blunt message of this book is that American democracy is in much deeper trouble than most people wish to acknowledge.  Behind the reassuring facade, the regular election contest and so forth, the substantive meaning of self-government has been hollowed out.  What exists behind the formal shell is a systemic breakdown of the shared civic values we call democracy

         The Battle Over Citizen Lawmaking: A Collection  of Essays Edited by M. Dane Waters, Caroline Academic Press, 2001

An In-Depth Review of the Growing Trend to Regulate the People's Tool of Self-Government: The Initiative and Referendum Process

         The New Challenge of Direct Democracy by Ian Budge, Polity Press, 1996

The new challenge of direct democracy lies in the startling fact that it is now technically possible.  Public policy can be discussed and voted upon by everyone linked in an interactive communications net.  Such nets are spreading through the world, so they can easily carry debates among the citizens of any one State.  This destroys the killer argument habitually used to knock direct democracy on the head, that it is just not practical in modern mass societies to bring citizens together to discuss public policy.  The existence of electronic communications means that physical proximity is no longer required.  Mass discussion can be carried on interactively even when individuals are widely separated.  Hence opponents of popular participation need o find other, more cogent arguments, if they want to reject direct democracy as a way of running a country.

What we do in this book is to review these arguments at a serious level of detail; whether they are for or against direct democracy, and whether they are moral, theoretical or factual.

         Stealing the Initiative: How State Government Responds to Direct Democracy by Elisabeth R. Gerber, Arthur Lupia, Mathew D. McCubbins, and D. Rederick Kiewiet, Prentice Hall, 2001

In Chapter One and Two the book provides a background history and description of the initiative process in California.  In Chapter Three they analyze the politics of compliance so as to be able to predict under what circumstances and conditions politicians will implement or resist compliance with the intent of the initiative.  Chapter Four through Fourteen contain case studies, an  explanation of why each case was chosen and a description of the conditions that effected the post-election fate of the initiative covered in the case study.  Chapter Fifteen, the final case study, is a comprehensive study of Proposition 13 of 1978 and how compliance with that proposition effected school funding in California. Proposition 13, America's most famous initiative, capped property tax rates and is widely blamed for the decline in school spending in California.  This study challenges that conclusion.  The final chapter concludes with the main lesson of the book, that initiatives do not implement or enforce themselves.  All initiatives require government actors to implement and enforce them and many factors have to be taken into consideration to determine how successfully an initiative will be once it is in the hands of the politicians and the bureaucrats who are responsible for its implementation.

         Dangerous Democracy? The Battle Over Ballot Initiatives in America, edited by Larry J. Sabato, Howard R. Ernst, and Bruce A. Larson, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2001

In Chapter One, Howard R. Ernst opens with an overview of ballot initiative trends in the twentieth century, an overview that points to the persistent advancement of direct democracy in the United States.  In Chapter Two, Bruce Cain and Kenneth Miller make an important distinction between populist and progressive conceptions of direct democracy and wage a broad assault on the former. In Chapter Three, Daniel Smith argues that the so-called citizen initiative is - and always has been - polluted by the influence of big (mostly corporate) money. Yet, while big money's influence on ballot initiatives suggests a need for reform, the federal courts have erected what Smith sees as an unjustifiable roadblock to state regulation of corporate expenditures in ballot campaigns.  In Chapter Four, Todd Donovan, Shaun Bowler, and David McCuan describe and respond to popular criticism of the modern "initiative industrial complex."  According to critics, the professionals who orchestrate ballot campaigns are mercenaries who care little about public policy, employ manipulative tactics to mislead voters, and generate business for themselves by pitching ballot measures to well-heeled interest groups who can bankroll them.  While acknowledging the initiative industry's excesses, the authors argue that many of these claims are overblown. In Chapter Five, Elisabeth Gerber explores the logic and pitfalls of reforming the ballot initiative process, and in the concluding chapter, the editors assess the arguments and evidence marshaled by he authors, identify the components of the ballot initiative process we believe to be most in need of repair, and put forth some reform ideas hat would considerably improve direct legislation processes.

         Lawmaking By Initiative: Issues, Options and Comparisons by Philip L Dubois and Floyd Feeney, Agathon Press 1998

This book is divided into three parts.  Part I (Chapters One through Five) concerns the development and use of the initiative in the United States and elsewhere.  Chapter Two and Three discuss the history of the initiative and how the concept fits into the American concept of Democracy.  Chapter Four contains a comparative analysis of the initiative process in the District of Columbia and the 24 American states that use the initiative, and Chapter Five  a discussion of the initiative in Switzerland and other countries.  Part II (Chapter Six through Twelve) contains analyses of six critical issues relating to the initiative process and suggestions for reform.  These issues include the basic structure of the initiative process (Chapter Six), signature requirements (Chapter Seven), the reduction of complexity (Chapter Eight through Ten), attempts to improve voter understanding (Chapter Eleven) and initiative campaign finance and disclosure (Chapter Twelve). Part III (Chapter Thirteen) contains conclusions and a summary.

         Direct Democracy or Representative Government:  Dispelling the Populist Myth by John Haskell, Westview Press, 2001

In this book the author argues that the populist notion of democracy is in fact unachievable and potentially dangerous, and that the representative democracy is based on sounder principles that better service the public interest. The core of his refutation of the claims of direct democracy is what he calls the "paradox of voting" which concerns the relationship of individual choice to group choice.  Essentially what he claims the research proves is that identifying the popular will by taking a vote is literally impossible to do with any certainty or precision.

         Democracy at Risk: Rescuing Main Street From Wall Street by Jeff Gates, Perseus Publishing, 2000, 20001

The author states that his goal in writing this book was to chronicle the dangers to democracy that accompany today's de facto merger of political parties, particularly when both have geared their economic policies not to democratic principles and to the needs of future generations but to the peculiar appetites of Wall Street.  In so doing they have created a business environment in which more than $17 trillion dollars now resides in the hands of U.S. money managers who respond solely to values denominated in financial terms and woefully insensitive to personal and community based concerns that must be addressed if we are to have a genuinely robust democracy.  The challenge lies in how to write the rules so that the market works well for as many people as possible without  impairing its capacity for creativity and prosperity and without damaging the natural world. It is called free-enterprise democracy.

         Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age by Benjamin Barber, University of California Press, 1984

An excess of democracy, it is often said, can undo liberal institutions.  Benjamin Barber argues to the contrary that an excess of liberalism has undone our democratic institutions.  For what little democracy we have had in the West has been repeatedly compromised by the liberal institutions and philosophy that undergrid it. It should be noted here that what Benjamin Barber means by "liberalism" is different than what we commonly refer to as the "liberal left of the Democratic Party".  Liberalism is defined in its classical sense as a philosophy of government that encompasses, for the most part, the whole of American politics from the left and the right.  It is a philosophy that  embraces a negative view of human nature and governance.  From Benjamin Barber's point of view it has stifled our sense of community and the common good; and at its worse it has become a justification for a myopic selfishness and greed that undermines our social fabric.

         Citizen Lawmakers: The Ballot Initiative Revolution by David D. Schmidt, Temple University Press, 1989 

Just as the American Revolution shifted ultimate authority from the agents of a distant Crown to locally elected representatives, the Ballot Initiative Revolution is shifting ultimate authority form representatives in state legislatures, city councils, and even Congress to the people themselves. This trend toward participatory democracy is deeply disturbing to some observers, who distrust the capacity of the electorate to make intelligent decisions on complex issues.  To others, however, from the late Howard Jarvis, originator of Proposition 13, to consumer advocate Ralph Nader, greater use of the ballot Initiative is a major  advance towards a government truly of, by, and for the people.

         Demanding Choices: opinion, Voting, and Direct Democracy, by Shawn Bowler and Todd Andrew Donovan, UMP, 1998

    Can  the voter make sense of direct democracy? Are they capable of making choices that are consistent with their interests and desires, or is the act of voting on initiatives and referenda haphazard - or, worse, is it subject to confusion and manipulation?  Do decisions reflect some underlying abilty to respond to information that is relevant to policy decisions, or are the choices that citizens make on ballot measures capricious, reflecting nothing but whim?  Do the choices made at the end of an initiative campaign reflect an ability to reason?  These questions are the focus of this book.  As we shall  illustrate, the conventional answer to these questions has not been flattering to voters, at least in the view of academic politicl scientists.

       In this book, we demonstrate that voters in a direct democracy engage in a substantial amount of reasoning.  We assume that different ballot propositions create different settings for voter choice - and these propositions provide voters with a variety of information cues and heuristics that guide the choices they make. some of these choices are more informed or more "self interested" than others. Working from this perspective that views voters as responsive to minimal levels of information (Lupia 1992, 1994a), we provide evidence that the choices hat voters in a direct democracy make are reasonably informed.  In addition, these choices often appear consistent with the interests and values of the voters, and they reflect a responsiveness to the available information sources.

The Center for True Democracy