The last decade has seen a resurgence in interest in three direct democracy devices—the initiative, the popular referendum and the recall. These processes reflect the Progressive Era reformers' aim of enlarging the role of citizens and voters as well as restricting or checking the power of intermediary institutions such as state and local legislatures, political parties, and elected executives. The focus of this article is to examine the increased use of the initiative and popular referendum at the state level as well as how the process actually works. The related processes of the recall and teledemocracy are addressed in other articles in this symposium.

Statewide Provisions for Initiative, Popular Referendum and Recall

The initiative process permits petitioners to write and, if a sufficient number of valid signatures are gathered, place those proposals on the ballot. The initiative can be placed directly on the ballot (the direct initiative); or before the legislature. If the legislature does not enact the measure or otherwise satisfy the sponsors of the initiative, the sponsors can gather additional signatures and place their proposal on the ballot (the indirect initiative). Five times as many states have the direct initiative as the indirect and, in states that permit both, proponents typically prefer to go directly to the ballot.

Americans generally support the idea of direct democracy yet they also, if not as much as most political scientists, appreciate the undesirable consequences of by-passing our representative processes. The populist impulse is alive and well, both at the state level and for the national government. Voters tell pollsters they are not afraid of direct democracy because they are not afraid of the people who elect our public officials.

Most Americans view direct democracy processes not as radical measures intended to subvert or alter the basic character of American government, but rather as modifying measures aimed at complementing representative institutions, and also as a means of guaranteeing that representative bodies actually remain representative and accountable. But the extensive use of direct democracy at the state and local levels in recent years has raised concerns about the integrity of the initiative, referendum and recall.

If Americans want more of a voice in state and national policymaking, many citizens also worry about the abuses of too direct an involvement. After a brief look at the historical context of this long-standing debate, I will report on several public opinion surveys that highlight Americans' ambivalence toward populist democracy devices.

The signs are abundant that many of the institutions and processes of American politics are becoming increasingly direct. As communication technologies erode the mediating roles played by secondary leadership, citizens and public officials interact directly with each other more intensively and more frequently.

As this gale has moved through our political system, different scholars have noted their own particular “straw in the wind.” By far the most attention has been given to the declining capacity of party as a mechanism mediating between voters and office holders (Polsby, 1983; Kirkpatrick, 1978). A different viewpoint comes from Samuel Kernell, who has revised Richard Neustadt's work on the presidency by arguing that presidential power is increasingly secured and exercised through public opinion influence (Kernell, 1986). Those who have studied the activities of incumbent Congressmen and Senators note that they have also extended their direct contact with constituents: not only have the flows of mail into and out of congressional offices increased markedly over the past two decades, but the establishment of C-Span has brought congressional business into literally millions of homes (Abramson, Arterton, and Orren, 1988). Moreover, in a constant search for new ways of contacting citizens, congressmen are in the forefront of experimentation with cable television, satellites, VCRs and computer communications (Arterton, 1987).

April 4, 1988 marked the end of the most divisive and tumultuous period in the history of Arizona politics. For the first time in its seventy-six years as a state, Arizona, and the nation, witnessed the removal of a sitting governor, Evan Mecham, by conviction on impeachment charges by the Arizona Senate. Evan Mecham was the first governor in United States history to be confronted with a recall, impeachment and criminal indictment simultaneously. Although removed from office, the impact of Mecham's fifteen-month administration will permeate the social and political fabric of Arizona, as well as cloud its national image, for many years to come. This essay will briefly examine the concept of recall as an exercise in direct democracy, and the factors and context surrounding the recall drive and impeachment proceedings of Governor Evan Mecham.

The Recall and Arizona's Provision

The recall is one of three aspects of the concept of “direct democracy,” the others being referendum and initiative. According to Wilcox (1912, p. 169) the initiative and referendum are instruments in the exercise of “pure democracy” which supplement representative government—the initiative is direct participation on the part of citizens in legislative action, while the referendum is an exercise in veto action. Conceptually, however, the recall is different. It does not involve direct citizen participation in the legislative activities of government, but is concerned with their ability to remove officials, principally elected but in some rare instances appointed, from office before the end of their term. As Wilcox stated, recall “… is simply the guaranteed right of the people to discharge their public servants when the public servants cease to be satisfactory to them” (Wilcox, 1912, p. 169).

Consider an election in which all the choices are dismal, albeit some perhaps even more dismal than others. How should voters in such an election choose whom to vote for or whether or not to vote?

It has been suggested (Riker and Ordeshook, 1973; cf. Weisberg and Grofman, 1981) that a voter is unlikely to vote if no choice exists whose election would yield him any appreciable degree of delight. Such a voter is alienated from the system. Consider, now, an election whose outcome is virtually certain. The conventional wisdom is that such certainty as to outcome should depress turnout, since ceteris paribus, voters who come to see their vote as making no difference should be less likely to vote than when they saw themselves as having a chance, however remote, to influence the outcome.

Forty-six years ago political scientist E. E. Schattschneider (1942, p. 1) declared, “[P]olitical parties created democracy … and modern democracy is unthinkable save in terms of parties.” When he wrote these famous words in Party Government Schattschneider had in mind the robust condition of the Democratic and Republican parties in his native Connecticut. In a 1980 position paper, the Committee for Party Renewal echoed Schattschneider: “Without parties there can be no organized and coherent politics. When politics lacks coherence, there can be no accountable democracy. Parties are indispensable to the realization of democracy. The stakes are no less than that.”

The Committee for Party Renewal urges state legislators and party leaders to re-evaluate local party organizations and adopt measures to revitalize them. Led by the Republican National Committee playing catch-up by the 1980s, the national parties have been busy revitalizing themselves. It is time to begin party building efforts in the states and return state parties to positions of primacy in policy-making.

A standard warning by professional sovietologists to Americans making approaches to the Soviet Union is that amateurs lack the language skills with which to grasp the subtleties of discourse, they lack the training in the culture and history, they misunderstand the use of ideology in Soviet thinking, and they are overly optimistic concerning the ability of the Russians to change. Yet, an American peace-oriented movement, Beyond War, working with a committee of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, has published a book, both in Russian and English, which defines the terms of survival in the nuclear age. It has won praise from “realists” such as Alexander Dallin, Robert Conquest, George Breslauer, and William Colby. The book, Breakthrough: Emerging New Thinking, has also received praise from such respected Soviet professionals as Georgi Shakhnazarov, a Vice President of the International Political Science Association.

Bertrand de Jouvenel, who died a year ago this March, at the age of 83, is best known to American political scientists for three books—On Power (1945), Sovereignty (1957), and The Pure Theory of Politics (1963)—and several essays, among them “The Chairman's Problem” and “The Nature of Political Science.”

I almost met Bertrand de Jouvenel in the summer of 1964, when I was 20 years old, a political science major at Oberlin College, and the editor of a student political magazine called The Activist. I was also a student of Wilson Carey McWilliams, a prolific source of article ideas for the magazine, and a reliable guide to the academics and journalists who we often tapped for free copy. Since I was about to spend two months in France, and since Carey had been de Jouvenel's student at Berkeley when de Jouvenel was a Visiting Professor there, why not take a letter of introduction and get an Activist article from one of Europe's most famous political scientists?

In our last PS article we discussed the vicissitudes of statistics package purchasing. Our focus was on low and mid priced products. We found a much wider variation in performance and quality than is seen in more popular programs sold to the business market for word processing, data base management, or spreadsheet work. This variation and the associated possibility of buying a package that does not meet one's needs makes statistical software selection especially difficult. Statistics packages are not commonly found in retail outlets so that in-store trials cannot be made. Reviews and articles can narrow the field, but the user is still obliged to carefully study manufacturers' specifications and to discuss particular needs with company technicians by telephone.

We determined that for a large majority of users the moderately priced SYSTAT was the best choice unless menus or high quality presentation graphics were required. A new graphics module corrects the latter problem. If one's data base is within 64 K, STATGRAPHICS with its wealth of statistical techniques, menu driven ease of use, and its superb graphics was also recommended as was the inexpensive NCSS.