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Explaining Correct Voting in Swiss Direct Democracy

The quality of a political system, and especially of a direct-democratic one, lies in the quality of the decisions citizens take. As some authors argue, this can be measured through the overall presence of "correct voting", namely the fact that even uninformed citizens can mimic the choice of political experts (Lupia 1994; Lau and Redlawsk 1997; 2006). A growing body of researches tries to identify and explain the presence of correct voting (Holbrook and McClurg 2006; Lau, Andersen and Redlawsk 2008; McClurg and Sokhey 2008); however, these researches have essentially concentrated on electoral issues rather than on the decisions taken by citizens on ballot propositions (Hobolt 2007 being the only exception we know of). The aim of the present paper is consequently to propose a multilevel model capable of explaining the presence of correct voting in direct-democratic choices, in a similar fashion than what Lau, Andersen and Redlawsk (2008) have done in regards to American electors. Based on Swiss data on federal ballots (1999-2005), our model will investigate the simultaneous effects on correct voting of individual characteristics (mainly political sophistication), contextual factors (intensity of the campaign, priming, justification of arguments, negative campaigning, and complexity of the project submitted to the vote), and cognitive strategies activated by citizens (the use of different heuristics). As our results show, a higher quality of the decision is produced by explanatory factors from different levels. Our paper thus opens up new venues for studying political behavior by showing that analyses of correct voting should not be limited to electoral issues, and by providing empirical analyses able to grasp the theoretical complexity behind the emergence of more accurate decisions.