Direct democracy and equality: context is the key

Abstract Direct democratic instruments are increasingly applied in many European countries. They are subject to an ongoing public—and often highly controversial—debate. The question of how direct democracy relates to equality, i.e. if direct democratic instruments have the potential to foster equality or if they lead to more inequality, is crucial in this debate. Research has struggled to come up with a general answer to this question with scholars assuming equality as well as inequality-promoting effects of direct democratic outputs. In this paper, we try to shed new light on this controversial debate and argue that the impact of direct democracy on equality essentially depends on the social and political context in which the decisions take place. In order to examine the impact of context factors on direct democratic outputs, we first analyze the influence of country-specific variables such as the level of equality and the age of democracy—applying large-N multilevel logistic regressions. Yet, these statistical analyses offer no clear results: the effects of the country-specific variables are rather blurry and hard to make meaning of. The result suggests that other factors than the ones we included in the regressions are decisive for the effect of direct democratic instruments on equality. Therefore, in a second step, we demonstrate how country-and case-specific variables such as social and political characteristics impact the outcomes of direct democracy, using the same-sex marriage referendums in Ireland and Slovenia in 2015 as examples. We conclude that context factors are too complex to be grasped in a large-N, statistical analysis. This means that to understand how context influences the effects of direct democratic instruments on equality, for now, one has to go beyond the lens of statistical analysis and look at the respective cases in great depth and detail.