The impact of direct democracy on policy change: insights from European citizens’ initiatives
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Scholarship about both politics and policy tends to represent tools of direct democracy as veto points that are used to prevent policy change. In this study, we move beyond this unidimensional view and explain the conditions under which instruments of direct democracy can be conducive to policy change. We investigate both the direct and indirect effects of citizens’ initiatives to show that, under certain conditions, these can provide an opportunity for incremental yet potentially transformative policy change. We offer a systematic and comparative assessment of the policy effects generated by a set of European Citizens’ Initiatives (ECIs). ECIs provide an ideal setting for uncovering the potential indirect policy effects since they are not legally binding. Interestingly, some ECIs had tangible effects on EU policies, and these effects materialised over time and at different levels of the EU’s political system, and can be regarded as building blocks for potentially transformative policy change.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it