Are politicans from large states more corrupt?

California pensions: San Jose mayor's initiative may not make November ballot

SAN JOSE -- The white-hot political battle over public pension reform was supposed to go before a statewide vote this November with a constitutional measure championed by San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed. But now that suddenly is in question.

Reed, who leads a group of California city leaders campaigning for the proposal as a solution to soaring retirement costs, said Thursday they are mounting a court challenge to the state Attorney General's ballot wording, claiming it mischaracterizes their initiative's intent.
Reed said it's unclear if a legal fight would allow enough time to collect the required signatures to get the pension reform measure on the ballot -- or push the effort back to the 2016 election cycle.

Is political corruption greater in Nebraska or California or Texas? This is currently a big issue in the inequality of America, corruption versus fair voting. How can we test the hypothesis?

Well, we could examine the issue of political accuracy with respect to the initiative process across the laboratory of American states, as long as we can control for the political corruption of the researchers themselves.

No says the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center:

Nebraska got an F on its ballot initiative process from a progressive think tank that wants to limit fraud in the process.
We're not alone.
Only five of 24 states that allow citizens to put initiatives on the ballot got a C or better from the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center.

Well, at least someone is looking. Who is the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center?

Although a lot of research goes into individual ballot-measure campaign efforts, no research has ever sought to look at ballot measures holistically to understand how they function in the electoral environment. There is a critical need for research that allows progressives to make better decisions about messaging, voter turnout, campaign tactics, spending and strategy. To equip progressives with the best data possible, the BISC Foundation has launched a multi-year research project.

So, fair ballots are only for progressives? Not a hopeful start. It looks very much that understanding fair voting by comparing the large and small states is not going to happen with these folks.

Rice University has done some work finding:

The results generated herein lend support for expectation that there are some consistent patterns in voting behavior on ballot initiatives. Notably, the results indicate that individual-level party identification is consistently related to voting behavior across each of the various types of ballot propositions. 

Georgia State University does a better job:

Ballot questions often feature obscure and legalistic language that is difficult to comprehend. Because the language of ballot questions is often unclear, the authors hypothesize that questions with lower readability will have higher roll-off because voters will not answer questions they do not understand. The authors use an objective measure of readability to code readability scores for 1,211 state-level ballot questions from 1997 to 2007. Using hierarchical linear regression models of state-level data, the authors find that increased complexity leads to more roll-off. The authors further analyze some possible influences on readability by examining whether it is affected by the question topic.

Gated, but we need to see the comparison and look for correlations with big vs small states. Here is one from the University of Buffalo:

An abundance of recent research has suggested that direct democracy institutions, such as the initiative and referendum, craft an environment ripe for encouraging better democratic citizenship. High and frequent exposure to ballot measures has been shown to increase the awareness, efficacy, political participation, and even the general level of happiness of citizens. In contrast to these studies, I develop and test a theory that the use of ballot initiatives undermines the ability of government to prove themselves trustworthy. Using data from two surveys, I demonstrate that ballot initiatives in the American states do indeed create an environment that encourages citizens to distrust their government. The findings have implications in assessing the positive externalities to direct legislation as well as in understanding policy choice made in these elections.

Whoa, the ballot initiative educated voters! Now this is interesting because researchers in inequality have a hard time figuring if education follows or preceed democracy. This one says the democracy educates voters. A real problem for the Undemocrats of California who claim to be educators.

Tracy Gordon looks at California:

The statewide initiative process is a well-known and frequently used
way of making public policy decisions in California. What is not so well
known is that California voters also use the initiative process at the local government level and that they seem to do so far more often than votersin the rest of the nation.


Tracy Gordon reviews the use of the initiative at the local level in
California during the 1990s. She arrives at three main conclusions. First, initiative activity was concentrated in just a few jurisdictions. The majority of local measures were proposed in the Bay Area and South Coast regions. Although cities and counties in other regions also used the initiative, these two regions accounted for the lion’s share of activity.


Second, the most popular topics for initiatives in the 1990s were land use, governance, and safety—issues that are typically local and controversial. Issues relating to zoning changes, urban growth boundaries, open space preservation, and new development were frequently taken to the ballot box. At the county level, initiatives relating to the environment, water, and general service delivery were often the most likely to qualify for the ballot. Local measures were more likely to make it to the ballot box (75% to 80%) than their statewide counterparts (15%), but the approval rate was similar to that at the statewide level (40% to 45%).


Third, local initiatives are most common in larger, growing, and economically diverse cities. Gordon observes that larger populations, less political party affiliation, greater income diversity, and higher residential mobility can make it difficult for elected representatives to anticipate the needs of their constituents. Furthermore, voters may be less able to monitor the behavior of their elected representatives in larger jurisdictions. Thus, the initiative becomes an important adjunct to the process of representative decisionmaking in California’s larger cities and counties

This gives us some of the direct results we want. Local measures make it to the ballot box more often than statewide! This gives some support for Tim Draper's effort to subdivide the state.

Mike Ball has a good summary. He finds, among other results:

 In 2001 S. Brock Bloomberg expanded Matsusaka's work to consider if voters used statewide initiatives to allocate government resources in a more productive manner. He discovered that initiatives can lead states to more efficient economies, with findings to suggest that states with initiatives waste between 20% to 30% fewer resources. He also discovered that initatives accelerate economic convergence by about a third [11].

And more from the same review:

In a study conducted for the Public Policy Institute of California, Zolton Hajnal and Hugh Louch concluded that, in California, initiative votes over the past 20 years where nonwhite voters indicate a clear preference, they voted on the prevailing side 59% of the time. A statewide survey conducted in January 2000 by Mark Baldassare for the Public Policy Institute asked if citizen's initiatives or the governor/legislature were the best way to address California's problems. Responses to the poll question indicated that 76% of Whites, 73% of Asians, 83% of Latinos, and 92% of African Americans preferred citizen's initiatives. Minorities do not often vote as a bloc on initiative; however, when they do vote as a bloc they usually win because a substantial number of initiatives are decided by a margin of less than 10%. While California's initiative process is one of the most active in the nation, only 35% of initiatives placed on the ballot actually pass [15].

But, to my horror, we have a small state in which the politicians cheat:

In 1995, after a term-limits initiative was narrowly defeated, the Mississippi Legislature passed HB 472 with the effect of virtually insuring that such a measure would never reach the ballot again. The already stringent requirements were made even tighter, making it almost impossible to collect enough signatures to move an initiative through the system. The new law prohibited citizens from other states from circulating petitions, restricted signature gatherers from receiving pay based upon the number of petitions circulated or signatures gathered, and authorized the Secretary of State to refuse to file the petition if "one or more signatures" were found to be obtained in conflict with the law [19]. While there are still legal questions surrounding the more restrictive law, Mississippi voters were able to vote again on the term-limits measure in 1999, utilizing signatures obtained before HB 472 took effect. The voters rejected the term-limits proposal. Opponents of the initiative process have been successful in their efforts to restrict its use.

 Smart guy Mr. Ball, he looks directly across three diverse state:

We have discussed the initiative process and have examined differing applications of it in three culturally diverse states: California, Ohio, and Mississippi. While the process has obviously had a major impact upon the state government in California, its overt effects in Ohio and Mississippi appear minimal. While some of the effects of the initiative process are evident and quantifiable to some extent, there are latent advantages that are difficult to measure.

I will be spending time in this area, reporting results. I know the issues and I can detect the fraudulent researchers. Stay tuned.