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Supporters turned in enough signatures to move forward with the initiative effort, but Arkansas Secretary of State John Thurston rejected thousands of signatures gathered by paid canvassers over an alleged failure to submit proper documentation for those canvassers. Medical marijuana proponents continue to gather signatures for an amendment to improve patient access to cannabis because they didn't turn in enough valid signatures to qualify for the November ballot. If I were king for a day, I'd probably try to make the initiated act process more accessible to citizens and less susceptible to legislative interference after the fact because that's what dissuades ballot groups from offering initiated acts over constitutional amendments.

Dictatorships that use plebiscites – that is, referendums initiated by the executive – have a longer expected lifespan. A successful plebiscite sends a signal that makes coordination for collective action more difficult and induces the falsification of preferences. It also enhances the status of the dictator within the regime and against potential rivals through the use of agenda power. As a result, plebiscites are followed by decreased mobilization and a reduced risk of palace coups. This, in turn, adds years to the dictator's tenure. We have found evidence to support these propositions by utilizing data from various databases of autocratic regimes that span from 1946 to 2008.

This article presents an experiment in which 49 Indonesian villages were randomly assigned to choose development projects through either representative-based meetings or direct election-based plebiscites. Plebiscites resulted in dramatically higher satisfaction among villagers, increased knowledge about the project, greater perceived benefits, and higher reported willingness to contribute. Changing the political mechanism had much smaller effects on the actual projects selected, with some evidence that plebiscites resulted in projects chosen by women being located in poorer areas. The results suggest that direct participation in political decision making can substantially increase satisfaction and legitimacy.

This article analyzes the coalition regime of the National Front in Colombia and its popular legitimation through the 1957 plebiscite. The objective is to reconstruct the process that led to institutional reform and the central characteristics of the plebiscite. The argument includes two statements. On one hand, the central actors in the process were élite parties that, despite their divisions and historical confrontations, came together to defend their positions of power against Gustavo Rojas Pinilla’s intention to remain in the presidency and overcome the widespread violence that affected the country. On the other hand, the plebiscite was conceived as a means of social legitimation of the decisions of the élites and the mobilization in its support was highly successful, although its content imposed severe limitations on the democratic regime. It is an analysis of a historical conjuncture based on documentary analysis and electoral statistics whose sources are newspaper archives, official statistics and complementary bibliography

The comparative study of authoritarianism has neglected plebiscites, and the comparative study of referendums tends to see in them a form of direct democracy regardless of the regime. We conceptualize dictatorial plebiscites as a genuine authoritarian tool, as part of a repressive strategy with the objective of hindering internal regime rivals and discouraging the coordination of the external opposition. We provide empirical evidence from dictatorships for the period 1946–2008 that is compatible with our expectations.

The plebiscite is well understood by political actors as a means of breaking parliamentary deadlocks or as a tool for government to establish a mandate. While it is recognised that a plebiscite may be lawfully procured by different means (by legislation or under the executive power), the law in Australia has so far struggled to characterise the substance of these activities. What is a vote may be a poll, a plebiscite or the gathering of statistics. Few detailed treatments of the topic exist. After identifying the different competences which support these activities, and after drawing together current understandings, this article offers a survey of the constitutional work performed by plebiscites in Australia and seeks to evaluate their place, as a species of political participation, within the normative system of representative government described by the Constitution.

Recent referendums show that autocratic regimes consult voters even if the outcome is a foregone conclusion. They have been doing so with increasing frequency since Napoleon consulted French citizens in 1800. Why and when do dictatorial regimes hold referendums they are certain they will win? Analysing the 162 referendums held in autocratic and non-free states in the period 1800–2012, the article shows that referendums with a 99% yes-vote tend to occur in autocracies with high ethnic fractionalization and, in part, in sultanistic (tinpot or tyrannical) regimes, but generally not in communist (totalitarian) states. An explanation is proposed for this variation.

Democracy is what philosophers call an \"essentially contested concept.\" An essentially contested concept is a concept on whose meaning people agree in a broad and even nebulous way. When a political concept, in particular, is widely or universally thought of as desirable proponents of particular governing arrangements struggle to define the concept as including their favored arrangements and excluding competing arrangements. Here, Lowenstein discusses the contested concept of democracy and its various definitions.

Over the last decade a variety of models to analyse incomplete multivariate and longitudinal data have been proposed, many of which allowing for the missingness to be not at random, in the sense that the unobserved measurements influence the process governing missingness, in addition to influences coming from observed measurements and/or covariates. The fundamental problems that are implied by such models, to which we refer as sensitivity to unverifiable modelling assumptions, has, in turn, sparked off various strands of research in what is now termed sensitivity analysis. The nature of sensitivity originates from the fact that a missingness not at random (MNAR) model is not fully verifiable from the data, rendering the empirical distinction between MNAR and missingness at random (MAR), where only covariates and observed outcomes influence missingness, difficult or even impossible, unless we are willing to accept the posited MNAR model in an unquestioning way. We show that the empirical distinction between MAR and MNAR is not possible, in the sense that each MNAR model fit to a set of observed data can be reproduced exactly by an MAR counterpart. Of course, such a pair of models will produce different predictions of the unobserved outcomes, given the observed outcomes. Theoretical considerations are supplemented with an illustration that is based on the Slovenian public opinion survey, which has been analysed before in the context of sensitivity analysis.

Described as “the age of extremes” by historian Eric Hobsbawm, the 20 century was defined by heavily-contested borders and identities in Central Europe: politically, culturally, socially, and intellectually. With the end of World War I, communities found themselves in new nation- states, and the politics of assimilation and relations between minorities and their kinstates created tensions that continue to reverberate today. Using the Slovene minority in Austria as a case study, the article provides insight into two international projects that involve civil society actors in the field of memory politics and young people and their attitudes towards history and minorities. In drawing lessons from these initiatives dealing with troubled pasts to counteract current forms of exclusive identity politics, the article proposes that effective minority protection depends on a conductive social environment that allows for the reflection of opposing narratives stemming from ethnic conflict and acknowledges diversity as enrichment.