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In the shadows of the recent gubernatorial recall election, California voters also deliberated a controversial ballot measure that would have banned the state from collecting most race and ethnicity data about its residents. As recently as four months before the election, polls suggested Proposition 54 was favored by more than a 20 point margin among likely voters. Like earlier controversial ballot initiatives that barred services to certain immigrants, outlawed public affirmative action programs, and eliminated bilingual education in public schools, Proposition 54 and its sponsor, Ward Connerly, seemed poised to realign the racial politics of the state once again. As the initiative won the endorsement of the state Republican Party and leading conservative commentators across the nation, civil rights groups scrambled to devise an opposition strategy that might prevent another ignominious defeat. But as public and media interest in the gubernatorial recall campaign ignited, polls showed support for Proposition 54 dropped precipitously. On Election Day, the initiative was defeated by nearly 30 points and exit polls indicated that nearly every major demographic and geographic subgroup, save conservative Republicans, opposed the measure by large margins. How can we account for this dramatic reversal in the fortunes of Proposition 54? Does its overwhelming rejection by the electorate signal a more inclusive, and less polarized approach towards racialized politics in the state? Is Connerly likely to bring his call for a ‘colorblind’ government back to voters in the future? This paper examines the findings of nearly a dozen polls, several focus groups, interviews with leading figures in the campaigns, and two years of media coverage around the initiative to answer these questions. In addition, I draw on theories of issue framing to understand how different segments of the electorate interpreted the meaning of Proposition 54 and its potential impact. I conclude with a discussion of future possibilities and trajectories for political discourse about race in the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I examine the features, functions, and implications of the ballot initiative as a policymaking institution by investigating the electoral success of the medical marijuana movement of the 1990s. Drawing on case studies of initiative campaigns in California and Maine, interviews with key actors, and document analysis, I explore how medical marijuana advocates successfully negotiated the demands of the initiative process and why opponents' attempts to defeat medical marijuana measures failed. By approaching the institutions of direct democracy from the perspective of ballot petitioners, I demonstrate how the features of the initiative process, including the lack of voter cues typical in candidate campaigns, the public nature of initiative battles, and the absence of compromise and amendability, benefit interests with particular skills and resources. While traditional policymaking institutions emphasize expertise, coalition-building, and deliberation that takes place among an elite audience, initiative policymaking places tremendous importance on organization, fundraising, advertising, and in particular framing and public marketing of a policy idea. In the case of medical marijuana, the initiative process allowed supporters to use their political skills and resources to expand the scope of conflict beyond what they saw as fainthearted legislators and powerful opponent law enforcement organizations in order to harness the public's support for medical marijuana as a policymaking resource. Contrary to the claims of many direct democracy opponents, I argue that money and organization are not responsible for manufacturing support for medical marijuana, but rather amplified the effects of existing grassroots and public support. Finally, the paper shows that the initiative process and the implementation of successful initiatives can allow different, even contradictory policy images and approaches to flourish at the state and federal levels. Venue-shopping on the part of... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several recent experiments have demonstrated that door-to-door mobilization efforts can significantly increase Latino turnout. However, these experiments have been limited to non-partisan efforts in Central California. This paper describes the result of a recent effort to increase the Latino vote in Maricopa County (Phoenix), Arizona, that urged citizens to vote in a particular way. Rather than simply encouraging participation, canvassers worked to convince Latino voters to support Proposition 414, a ballot initiative designed to prevent the closing of a local hospital. The results were dramatic; voters targeted by the mobilization effort were significantly more likely to vote. This demonstrates not only that personal mobilization efforts can increase Latino turnout in a variety of geographical locations, but also that such efforts can be particularly successful when voters are asked to vote in a way which is beneficial to their community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite widespread concern that direct democracy is growing out of control, we know little about the frequency or content of local direct democracy. In this paper we examine the incidence of initiatives on municipal ballots over a six-year period (1995-2000) in California to see if, in fact, Americans are relying heavily on direct democracy at the local level and also to uncover what types of issues are being addressed. We find that direct democracy usage is limited at the local level. Most cities do not place initiatives on the ballot. When cities do turn to direct democracy, growth-related issues, institutional reforms, and taxation are the most common subjects. We also use the large number and wide variety of local jurisdictions to address the question of why citizens turn to direct democracy in the first place. Multivariate analysis indicates that local needs and conditions, along with the responsiveness of municipal institutions, play a major role in determining the frequency with which cities resort to initiatives. There is little evidence that wealthy special interests play a primary role in bring initiatives to the ballot at the local level. Nor is their evidence of a widespread white backlash against growing racial and ethnic minority populations in local direct democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2004 San Francisco will use alternative voting. Concerns about voters understanding the new ballot are examined through an exit poll and mail-in survey of absentee voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

California has placed two controversial social issues on its ballot in recent years. First, in 2004, Californians were asked to approve the issuance of bonds to fund embryonic stem cell research. Second, the 2008 ballot contained a question that would define marriage in the state as solely between one man and one woman. The subject matter of both of these ballot questions are focused on issues that are of great importance for many Evangelical Christian denominations and Catholics. However, does the subject matter of a ballot question alone result in voting based on religious values? Or are religious values activated by religious leaders through the use of framing? This paper uses both individual exit poll data and analysis of the vote of each county compared with its denominational demography to construct regression models to shed light on these questions. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On May 15, 2008, the California Supreme Court made the unexpected and historical decision to allow same-sex marriages in the state. By using the universal concept of human rights to justify their decision, the California Supreme Court moved the issue into more protected and harder-to-argue-with legal territory. On that same day, as gays and lesbians rejoiced in California and around the world, opponents of same-sex marriage announced their efforts to submit for popular referendum a ballot measure (Proposition 8), which would make same-sex marriage illegal in the state. Both the Supreme Court decision and the fight to enact a same-sex marriage ban in the state have received wide media coverage in the U.S. and abroad. This paper uses media framing theory to examine how the five largest circulation daily newspapers in the U.S. have covered Proposition 8 in the six weeks before the elections. By identifying the main media frames used in the coverage, the paper intends to shed light on the way this issue was presented for discussion in the public arena. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To better understand the effects of list ordering on decision making, we explore how the ordering of candidates on ballots influences election outcomes. We find that a candidate listed first on a ballot is 9.8 percent more likely to win office than expected absent order-effects in our dataset of California multi-winner local elections. This first candidate advantage comes at the expense of candidates listed in the middle of the ballot. Using multi-winner elections allows us to isolate the mechanisms leading to order-effects in a way unavailable in single-winner elections. Even when voters still have votes to cast, the performance of a candidate is both position-dependent and history-dependent: candidates perform better in certain positions and when listed immediately after lower quality candidates. Our results suggest that policy makers should use more sophisticated rotation schemes to mitigate order-effects in elections. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of recent studies find that direct democracy increases voter turnout. In this article, we ask: whom does direct democracy mobilize to vote? From one perspective, voters mobilized by ballot initiative campaigns may reflect the partisan tenor of many ballot initiative elections. Alternatively, ballot initiatives might allow disaffected voters to fully express their policy preferences. Using a unique research design that incorporates neighborhood contextual variables with the California registered voter list, we demonstrate the strong partisan effects that social context exerts on participation in ballot initiative elections. Additionally, we clarify the way in which citizens are educated by initiatives to turn out through exposure to the institution at formative years. The findings demonstrate how partisan context mitigates the potential for direct democracy to mobilize from the middle. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What kinds of taxation are least objectionable to voters? The question is a classic preoccupation of public officials and political sociologists alike. We exploit two advances that make it possible to shed new light on this question. The first is a large, new corpus of digitized documents describing municipal tax policies of heterogeneous design that have been directly subjected to popular referendum in the state of California. The second is a suite of new computational methods for the analysis of large corpora of texts and their associated quantitative metadata. By applying these new methods to those new data, we show that tax policies of different description vary systematically in their popularity. We find that official descriptions of tax policy differ along two interpretable dimensions that are associated with voters' willingness to approve the tax. We interpret these dimensions as risk pooling and community orientation, and we show that measuring these dimensions can modestly improve our ability to predict the popularity of a tax, relative to a conventional regression specification that omits information about qualitative policy design. We discuss implications of our findings for the research on policy feedback effects, which has hitherto relied mostly on small-N comparisons with limited power, and on analytical descriptions of policy that are so far abstracted from the details of policy that they are difficult to operationalize. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on measuring county policies, the study examines the implementation of California counties' implementation of three policies enacted by statewide ballot initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous empirical research holds that candidates listed first on an election ballot gain additional votes. We examine whether or not California's randomization and rotation system should equalize the effects of order across candidates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2004, Massachusetts became the first state in the United States to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, and California followed suit in 2008. Yet, ballot initiative efforts to amend the Constitution to repeal same-sex marriage have failed in Massachusetts and succeeded in California. This research examines the causal mechanisms contributing to variation in ballot initiatives among states that have played an active role in same-sex marriage deliberation. We argue that institutional barriers play a large role in the initiative process by inhibiting a majority from imposing its will upon a minority. Understanding how ballot initiatives to amend the Constitution are successfully placed on the ballot and under what conditions they fail to do so is crucial in understanding the extent to which competing factions may have power to infringe upon the rights of a minority. The ease or difficulty of achieving ballot access for proposed initiatives can help us understand the nature of other contemporary social issues such as reproductive rights, affirmative action, and immigration as well as provide an analytical tool with which we can study previous social movements in the United States that have taken form at the state level. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]