By the People: Expanding Citizen-Led Policy in the United States

Amid deepening political dysfunction and distrust, ballot initiatives offer a time-tested mechanism for democratic correction and renewal. At the state level, ballot initiatives— sometimes referred to as direct democracy, citizen-initiated ballot measures, and initiative and referendum (or I&R), among other terms—allow voters to expand the policy agenda by proposing and voting on legislation or amendments to state constitutions. Initiatives provide opportunities for direct democratic engagement and the ability to bypass state legislatures when necessary to advance policies with wide support in the electorate.

“Expanding Citizen-Led Policy in the United States,” a project of New America’s Political Reform program, explores the uneven landscape of citizen-led policymaking in the United States, the feasibility and advantages of expanding ballot initiative processes to more states, and possible strategic paths reformers might take toward that goal.

While 26 states provide for at least one form of statewide citizen-initiated ballot measure, the rest of the country, home to about half of all U.S. residents, lacks any initiative access at the state level. This collection features resources, reports, and articles on expanding the number of U.S. states that allow ballot initiatives.

In the map below, the “Current Landscapes” tab shows the status of initiatives and referenda in the states that currently have some type of direct democracy at the state level. We categorized each of these states by the level of access they provide to direct democracy and the barriers they impose to actually using initiatives or referenda. States without any state-level direct democracy mechanism are shown in gray. For these states, the “State Readiness” map shows the degree to which they may be poised for adopting citizen-initiated ballot measures based on a scoring system that incorporates various indicators capturing the feasibility of adoption and the potential impact on democracy and governance. For more information on this score, see the Methodology section below.

We developed a scoring system to identify the most promising states for the expansion of citizen-initiated ballot measures. Based on a review of historical patterns, political science research, interviews with reform scholars and practitioners, and recent organizing experience, we conceptualized a state’s readiness for initiatives based on two dimensions: feasibility of adoption and potential policy impact. The feasibility dimension refers to factors associated with a higher likelihood of adopting ballot initiatives, as established by previous research on the topic, and to factors that would facilitate the work of people on the ground advocating for ballot initiatives. The impact dimension refers to factors that indicate places where ballot initiatives could have a greater impact because citizens have a greater difficulty expressing their views through the usual electoral channels.

The following table shows the overall scores and the rankings of the states, from potentially most amenable to work related to promoting initiatives to least, based on a combination of feasibility and impact indicators.

The accompanying table groups non-initiative states into four readiness categories. For example, states in the “Poised for Progress” category are the top five overall scorers: These states boast the highest feasibility scores, making them strong candidates for near-term efforts.

For a detailed description of how we calculated the rankings, please refer to our report, Expanding Citizen-Led Policymaking in the Twenty-First Century, where we explain our methodology, list all the indicators that go into the score, and provide sources for each indicator.