Paper prepared for Leuven-Montreal Winter School

This paper studies voting behavior in national referendums in Switzerland, more concretely what motivates voters to vote counter to the vote recommendations issued by the Swiss federal government. Defining such an outcome variable allow comparative analyses of referendum voting across referendums and countries. For this purpose, I use the full cumulation of the VOX post-referendum surveys that cover 245 national referendums held in Switzerland between 1981 and 2010. These surveys contain information on respondents’ voting behavior, their personal characteristics as well as referendum-specific information. I present initial results and discuss possible extensions.

Repository contains code and 'knitted' Paper.

For replication, download the VoxIt and swissvotes data (see below) and then run 01_data.R in folder data and 02_models.R in folder analysis before knitting the paper.

Usage conditions of the data prevent me from uploading them. VoxIt data can be obtained from FORS (registration necessary) and data on Swiss referendums can be obtained from swissvotes.ch