Preserving the Initiative: State Legislative Response to Direct Democracy

Over the last quarter-century, direct democracy has come to play an increasingly important role in state politics and policy. Political scientists have examined various aspects of the ballot initiative process, including state legislators' responses to the threat or passage of initiatives. The most prominent piece of scholarship on this topic finds that California legislators attempt to “steal” the initiative by displacing initiative content and subverting the implementation of voter-ratified ballot measures at will. Drawing on elite interview data, I show that in the moderate-use initiative state of Maine, legislators display cautious and deferential attitudes about the initiative process. Case study evidence from four recent initiatives demonstrates that legislators are reluctant to meddle with successful ballot measures and, when they do so, their goal is to mend flawed bills while preserving voters' intent. By drawing on new data sources and analyzing legislators' behavior and attitudes in a moderate-use state, the findings offer an important correction to the literature on legislative response to initiatives.