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33 Comp. Pol. Stud. 3 (2000)

handle is hein.journals/compls33 and id is 1 raw text is: Referendums have received increasing attention after the recent round of votes on the Maastricht treaty and the widening process of the European Union. Despite this increased interest in these instruments of decision making, scholarship has not provided us with insights into the relation- ship between the institutional characteristics and voter's decision. The authors provide a theo- retical argument on how the voter's choice is affected by the nature of the referendum. Relevant factors are whether the referendum is required, whether the people's decision has a binding char- acter, or which government coalition is presently in power. These institutional features mediate the impact of political factors, above all partisanship, on voting behavior. The authors test their theoretical arguments on the basis of empirical material from 14 referendums on European inte- gration and find consistent support for their theoretical contentions. REFERENDUMS ON EUROPEAN INTEGRATION Do Institutions Matter in the Voter's Decision? SIMON HUG University of Geneva, Switzerland PASCAL SCIARINI Universities of Basel and Geneva R ecently, referendums have attracted increased attention in the schol- arly community. Several popular decisions on European integration in the aftermath of the Maastricht treaty and the recent wave of additions to the European Union (EU) are the basis of this interest. Scholarly work on refer- endums can be classified into two broad categories. First, one finds detailed country-specific analyses of direct democratic votes. Most prominent among AUTHORS' NOTE: This is a heavily revised version ofa paper presented at the European Con- sortiumfor Political Research (ECPR) Joint Sessions of Workshops Bordeaux, April 27th-May 2nd, 1995; the Congrts suisse de science politique Bern, October 1995; and at the Colloquium series of the Graduate Institute for International Studies, Geneva. We wish to thank participants )COMPARATIVE POLITICAL STUDIES, Vol. 33 No. 1, February 2000 3-36 © 2000 Sage Publications, Inc. 3

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