Democracies strongly preserve status quo policies even when they no longer make sense and are unpopular. The paper below theorizes that policies that were previously the subject to decisive, close political fights stay that way after they are decided because people stop caring about those issues enough to change them after they are resolved.
Policy choices sometimes appear stubbornly persistent, even when they become politically unpopular or economically damaging. This paper offers the first systematic empirical evidence of how persistent policy choices are, defined as whether an electorate’s or legislature’s decisions affect whether a policy is in place decades later.
I create a new dataset that tracks the historical record of more than 800 state policies that were the subjects of close referendums in U.S. states since 1900. In a regression discontinuity design, I estimate that passing a referendum increases the chance a policy is operative 20, 40, or even 100 years later by over 40 percentage points.
I collect additional data on U.S. Congressional legislation and international referendums and use existing data on state legislation to document similar policy persistence for a range of institutional environments, cultures, and topics.
I develop a theoretical model to distinguish between possible causes of persistence and present evidence that persistence arises because policies’ salience declines in the aftermath of referendums. The results indicate that many policies are persistently in place—or not—for reasons unrelated to the electorate’s current preferences.
There is some irony in this result. One of the major reasons for opposition to democracy in the transition from monarchy, and for opposition to direct democracy, in particular, was the fear that this would led to frequent, radical policy changes as the public's mood shifted from election to election. It turns out that they had nothing to be afraid of on that score.
This empirical result also bodes well for the future of abortion rights in the United States now that Dobbs has overturned Roe v. Wade.
Red states like Kansas and Ohio have backed abortion rights in state referendums (Ohio passed a state constitutional right to abortion with almost 57% of the vote yesterday.) And, this academic study shows that those referendum decisions are likely to endure.
Image from the New York Times.
Image from the Washington Post.
Notably, and surprisingly, these massive regional abortion restrictions have not greatly impacted the number of abortions carried out nationally, as people have used abortion pills and travelled to other states to obtain abortions.
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