Colorado is the first state to intentionally bring back wolves by popular vote. But voting was just the beginning. From the ballot box to paws on the ground, this is Gray Territory, a limited series that takes a deeper look at wolf reintroduction and explores the complicated reality of coexistence. 

This transcript is from season five of the award-winning podcast, Laws of Notion, hosted by Kristan Uhlenbrock, Executive Director of the Institute for Science & Policy. For more information and resources from this episode, check out the episode summary page. Enjoy the transcript, and listen to the audio version at institute.dmns.org/gray-territory.

Bonus Episode| Citizen Lawmaking: Decoding Direct Democracy

Introduction

KRISTAN UHLENBROCK: This whole series started with a vote.

CBS COLORADO JIM BENEMANN: Colorado Proposition 114 is certainly expected to pass, so it looks like the wolves will indeed be reintroduced to our state over the next few years. It was an incredibly tight vote on the ballot measure. Look at the numbers: the yeses and nos separated by fewer than 30,000 votes. The extremely tight vote… (fades out)

KRISTAN: And I keep coming back to what that vote revealed, not only about reintroducing the gray wolf to Colorado, but also what it revealed about democracy: about the disagreements over this apex predator, about who gets to make decisions and what the best way to do that is, and about the role of direct democracy versus representative democracy, and how these parts of our system interact.

So, I met with Dr. John Matsusaka, who has spent almost 40 years thinking about exactly these kinds of questions. Not about wolves specifically, but about how direct democracy functions more broadly. And talking to him illuminates that what happened in Colorado in 2020 wasn't just a wildlife story; it was a democracy story too.

This is a bonus episode of Gray Territory: The Return of Wolves to Colorado. I’m your host, Kristan Uhlenbrock.

JOHN MATSUSAKA: When people often talk about particular ballot propositions, they start arguing, and they find their way back to some first principle: why are we doing this in the first place? And what's the role of the people? And all those kind of things, just kind of the basics of what this is about.

My name is John Matsusaka. I'm a professor of business and law at the University of Southern California, and I'm also director of the Initiative and Referendum Institute, which is a non-profit, nonpartisan educational organization that tries to provide information to journalists, policymakers, the public, and anybody who wants to try to understand ballot propositions and navigate through them.

KRISTAN: Beyond John’s own research and teaching, he’s consulted for the White House Council of Economic Advisors, been interviewed by most major news outlets, and written two books, including his latest, Let the People Rule: How Direct Democracy Can Meet the Populist Challenge.

JOHN: What attracted me to this field was, way back when I was a graduate student, I remember one day I was in the stacks of the library – back when people went into stacks – and I pulled this book off the shelf, which was a research report from the state of New York, and it was all about how the people should never vote on anything because it was going to mess up democracy.

I grew up in Washington. We voted on things all the time. I think people assumed that if there was something they didn't like, they could call a vote on it. And it was quite shocking to me that there was this other view that I hadn't been aware of. And so that got me thinking, and that curiosity about why you would do this and when led on to years and years of research.

Defining Direct Democracy

KRISTAN: What exactly is direct democracy? It sounds straightforward: the people vote directly on an issue. But the machinery behind it, and the philosophy underneath it, is more complicated than that.

JOHN: There are two ways to do democracy. One is that the people pick a bunch of other people to go make decisions for them. So, they elect representatives. That's called representative democracy. We need a law, we elect some people, they go make it for us. The other way you can do democracy is the people make the laws directly themselves. So [for example] they vote on whether or not to reintroduce wolves.

Direct democracy is the one where you cut out the middleman in some sense and the people vote on the laws directly. Within that category, direct democracy, there are all different things. There are initiatives and referendums and all kinds of different things, but the basic idea is always the same: it's that people are voting directly without intermediation of an elected official.

The default for democracy is that we elect other people to go do the laws. That's the starting point for most modern democracies. And it makes perfect sense because ordinary people don't want to be legislators. They want to do their job, and have somebody else do their job.

KRISTAN: And yet, there are some valid reasons why people might want something beyond a solely representative democracy.

JOHN: The first reason you might want to do direct democracy is because the elected officials might not be paying enough attention to the interests of the people. This is really what brought about things like the initiative and referendum in the 20th century, because there was a very strong belief that legislators had been captured by powerful interest groups, corporations, and so forth, and they were not listening to the people. And the feeling was that when that happens, it's healthy in a democracy to have a safety valve where the people can go around them in some kind of way.

KRISTAN: Aspects of direct democracy have existed in some form since the 1600s in the United States. As John mentioned, there are typically two processes: initiatives and referendums. There are many layers to these, but most simply when it relates to citizen-led processes, initiatives are measures that bypass the legislature, and referenda are measures that would veto something the legislature passes. In 1898, South Dakota became the first state to adopt an initiative process. Since then, 25 additional states, DC, and the US Virgin Islands have adopted some form of direct democracy.

JOHN: The other reason, which is a more fundamental reason, really gets down to the core of democracy, which is that democracy is supposed to be a system of self-government ultimately. We moved away from kings, and we moved away from the world where we said the king or a bunch of aristocrats know what's best for us. And we decided we're going to adopt a system where we have faith in the people to know what's best for themselves. And [the issues are] not something that you can turn over to a small number of elected officials or a small number of technocrats or specialists.

They come down to values issues: what kind of world do we want to live in? What kind of community do we want to have around us? And what we decided when we started democracy in the first place is that ultimately, the people get to make those decisions. There are times when the elected officials could make the decision for us, but it probably makes more sense to push that decision back to the people and let them figure out what they want their community to look like.

Values and Technical Issues

KRISTAN: Issues that call for a policy response can be values-based, technically complex, or, more often, a murky combination of both. For example, I saw the arguments for and against wolf reintroduction toggle between these two frames.

JOHN: There's no clear line between what's a value issue and what's a technical issue. I've seen ballot propositions that get into very technical details about reporting requirements for insurance companies on detailed aspects of policies and things like that. Not even consumer-friendly things, but just technical things where you'd have to be an expert on risk and insurance to even understand it. That doesn't seem like that's a useful thing for the people to do.

Sometimes some decisions come down to really core values of the people. And some of those issues are not something where it really requires an expert. I would put things like abortion rights, capital punishment, legalization of drugs, and so forth. These are things which are not really technical issues. You don't need an expert; they really come down to a community's values.

The ideal ballot measure, in my mind, would focus attention more on the value dimensions of an issue and less on the technical dimensions of the issue. I was thinking about reintroduction of wolves, which obviously is a Colorado thing from 2020. But it seems to me there's a value-based thing: How do we want to manage our wilderness? Do we want to have these animals there or not? But then there's a bunch of technical dimensions of that. Suppose you decide you do want to do it… I don't know anything about wolf biology, but I could imagine there are things like, suppose you're going to release some wolves. Where do you do it? Do you do it on a mountain or valley? Do you do it in the spring or the summer? Do you release them in singletons or in groups of ten? Those are very technical, detailed issues. That kind of detail shouldn't be included in a proposition because that should be left to the experts.

KRISTAN: And it's worth sitting with that distinction for a moment: the difference between what might be part of a ballot initiative for voters to vote on and what details require a level of research or examination before implementation. Even whether a decision belongs in the hands of voters or stays with agencies is itself a value-based question, which is partly why the vote on wolf reintroduction keeps generating so much heat.

A public way this has played out is the phrase “ballot box biology.” You heard this phrase throughout the series. It’s the argument that wildlife decisions should be made by trained scientists or technocrats. John draws a careful line.

JOHN: I understand ballot box biology to be the idea that there are technical experts in wildlife management that have knowledge about how to do this. And then, apparently, it's taken beyond that to say therefore they should make the decisions. I think the first part is actually right. You want to use experts to inform policy, but to the extent the decisions start to have value components to them, the expert's values are no more important than an ordinary person's values.

There are technical issues about, say, releasing wolves, that you want to respect and let [technical experts] decide what's the best way to release wolves. Again, I just made up an example, but should you release them in singletons or in packs? I don't know the answer to that, but I assume there are experts in wolves that would know that answer. Let them do that for sure. There's no reason to write a ballot proposition that tells them how to do that. But there are a bunch of value issues here. One is just animal rights. The other is what our wilderness is going to be used for. Those are not expert decisions. Those are decisions about our values and what kind of world we want to live in, and everybody’s entitled to their own views.

KRISTAN: Proposition 114 is worth looking at through that lens. At its core, it asked a values question: do Coloradans want to reintroduce wolves to the landscape? That's the kind of question John would say belongs to voters. But the measure also embedded some specifics: a geographic boundary west of the Continental Divide, a three-year deadline, and a compensation requirement for loss of livestock. Those details lean more technical. And whether these specifics belonged in a ballot measure or should have been left to Colorado Parks and Wildlife and the Commission is itself a debate worth having. One could argue these specifics tied the hands of the very experts who would have to carry it out. Yet one could also argue these were included to give the mandate teeth.

Initiatives as a Safety Valve

KRISTAN: Throughout our reporting, one thread kept surfacing among wolf advocates: the sense that they had spent years working within the system – attending meetings, submitting comments, engaging agencies – only to feel like their values were not taken into account. It's part of why they went to the ballot.

John talks about the dynamic more broadly: where people find ways to have their perspectives heard when they feel the current decision-makers are not representing their interests.

JOHN: What's really interesting is that one of the original purposes of the initiative was to provide a safety valve for decisions that were made by elected officials. But nowadays, a lot of decisions are not made by elected officials, but by technocrats. Some people view that as a pejorative term. I don't mean it in that way, I just mean it as a bureaucrat with technical expertise. But a lot of decisions are not made by elected officials, but are made by technocrats. That wasn't the original purpose of the initiative, but it applies perfectly well: as the locus of government has turned to those sort of folks, I would argue that it's healthy in democracy for people to have the opportunity to go in and correct those experts if they seem to be not doing their job. And I think everybody's realized – experts have come under a lot of criticism across the spectrum, especially COVID brought into the public eye – that it's not a surprise, but experts have political preferences too, just like everybody else. And they try their best, I believe, to make decisions based on the facts, but they're humans. And humans, even in their best efforts, sometimes it doesn't work.

Sometimes their efforts slip into their decisions. And so, I think the idea of initiatives is to say, sometimes if the voters think they're going too far, they're not just sticking to their expertise, they have the right to correct them. Hopefully, they'll use that sparingly.

In a democracy, you don't want to put all your confidence in just one thing, like elections every four years, because it can fail you. You want to have a bunch of different checks and balances all around the system to try to keep it working. That's why I think it's useful to have a safety valve. It's kind of a new frontier, because that wasn't the way it was originally thought to deal with technocrats. But it makes perfect sense, as they've become increasingly important, and in my opinion, correctly so. It's a complicated world. We need technocrats involved in decisions.

Voting Decision-making

KRISTAN: The balance of who should be making decisions and through what mechanism creates a system that is, by design, complicated. And it raises another question that can make people uncomfortable: do voters fully understand what they're voting on? And can they be influenced? It's easy for those questions to slide into elitism. But they’re also genuinely important questions for anyone who cares about whether direct democracy functions as intended.

JOHN: Certainly one of the big concerns with doing this is whether voters are up to the task; are they competent to do this? Voters express a lot of concern about other voters: they're not sure their fellow citizens are able to do this, but they're very confident that they themselves can do it.

There are problems with manipulation in ballot language. There are sometimes problems with one-sided campaign spending. Deceptive advertising can be an issue. To make ballot propositions work, the voters must be informed. If they don't understand what's going on with the issue, it's a recipe for disaster. So, you can't just say, “I want to do democracy,” and then walk away from it. You have to figure out the infrastructure by which we're going to do it. There are some very good practices that some states follow. California, for example, has one nice practice where there's a nonpartisan, fairly neutral body, the Office of the Legislative Analyst, that writes about a page-long summary of every issue, which is very neutral, amazingly so.

KRISTAN: In Colorado, we have a similar structure. It’s our Legislative Council Staff, the nonpartisan research office for the General Assembly, and they publish what’s called a Blue Book that we all get in the mail. Voters are also exposed to other materials like ads, signs, emails, and postcards that come from advocacy groups.

JOHN: You can't really regulate campaign spending under current law in this country. It's interpreted as a violation of free speech. So, groups are allowed to make their arguments. I think that's perfectly fine. I think that voters are smart enough to know that somebody advertising is trying to persuade them and may or may not be telling them the truth; voters are sophisticated in that sense. What can be a problem is if it's one-sided. If only one side has any money to run the campaign, then voters only hear one view, and that can cause problems.

KRISTAN: The research on the influence of campaign spending for ballot measures is limited and mixed. I find this surprising because the total amount of money that’s spent on campaigns for state ballot measures can rival what is spent on Presidential races. That said, some research suggests endorsements can influence voter support for or against an issue. Greater campaign spending raises awareness, which can help a voter decide. And that this can be more influential on a voter’s choice than knowing a fact about an issue. 

JOHN: What do people actually do when they're voting? Well, we know first of all what they don't do. They absolutely do not sit down there and read the text of the law. Nobody does that. It would be really hard for them to even understand it because it's written in legalese; you know, it's Section 1.3.B.C.I.4, right? And it's just definitions and stuff. So, voters just don't read that. So, what do they do? Well, if the states provide some sort of summaries, then they will use that, or if media outlets provide some kind of summary, they'll look at that. But they also rely a tremendous amount on endorsements or what we call information cues.

Essentially, it works like this: let's suppose I'm a strong animal rights advocate and there's a ballot proposition, which is called the “Help Animals Initiative.” Now, I'm a voter, and I have to decide what to do, and I don't know if this is really going to help animals or if it's some sneaky thing where some group is going to actually hurt animals, but they're titling it in some way to try to deceive me. How do I figure this out? I could go read the law and try to figure it out, but most people know that's not going to help them. So, what they typically do is they find some group that they trust. Let's suppose it's a trusted animal rights group who they know has the capability to actually read the law and put out an endorsement, and they go look at what this group says. And if the group says, “No, vote no, this is actually a stealth measure, you're not going to like it,” then they follow that endorsement.

What we've learned is that voters are very good at finding some information provider. It can be an interest group, it could be a politician, it could be a media outlet. It could be somebody in their social circle who follows things and knows in detail and they're able to learn from that person whether this reflects their interests or not. They're generally unable to tell you the details of the thing they're voting on. But that's kind of okay, because they're able to learn whether it's in their interest or not.

And there is one important lesson from all of that: to make this work well, we have to make sure that we provide a rich environment of endorsements and cues so that voters can find something. For big states, that's pretty good because there's a lot of groups and people out there chattering, so it's easy to find out. It's a little more challenging in small states where there might not be enough groups, so citizens might find it very difficult to find out information. But Colorado, I think, would be very good, especially on an issue like this.

KRISTAN: One of the biggest challenges isn’t just finding and sorting through the information for these big initiatives, but the fact that in some states, the ballot can be crowded. For example, I live in Denver, and my ballot for the last presidential election in 2024 had not only a slew of national choices but also a litany of other decisions, including over two dozen judges, regional transportation directors, and all kinds of state and local ballot measures.

JOHN: This is the thing I think about more than anything else. How can we get information out to voters? Because I'm a super strong believer in democracy. It's very imperfect, but it's better than all the alternatives. But to make it work, the voters have to have some knowledge. They have to be able to make sure that they're putting a check mark next to the name that's actually representing their interest.

We vote on more and more issues. We vote on more and more offices. People walk into the ballot box in many states, and you're voting on dozens of things. Judges, of course, are a really hard one. But you start getting into the county assessor or some obscure local official, the dog catcher, or something like this. I find it very difficult just to find any information on my local representatives in the little city I live in, in Los Angeles County, in South Pasadena. If I want to know how they voted in the past, I don't know where I'd find that. I'd probably have to go down to the archives or something like this. So we're asking voters to carry a lot of weight right now.

KRISTAN: If people don’t have the time or information available, there are a few ways they might act. And John says it might not always have good outcomes.

JOHN: Some of them will just abstain, which probably is not a bad idea. If you really don't know, don't just pick names. But sometimes they might cue off things we'd rather they didn't. They might look at a name, and maybe it's a racial or an ethnic group that they like or dislike. So, I think this is a huge problem.

I do think AI might ultimately help us with some of these things because I think people will be able to use these tools to essentially collect a lot of information that's not feasible now. If we want our democracy to work, we have to make sure we're providing an infrastructure so the voters are capable of doing that.

KRISTAN: Voters, it turns out, have a kind of instinct for when a measure is asking too much of them.

JOHN: As initiatives become increasingly complicated and they increasingly get into details, they're more likely to fail. And so, I think voters instinctively don't like things that are overmanaged. I don't think they think about it in the abstract way that I just posited there. But I think when they read something really detailed, they start to wonder, “what's going on?” They're wondering what's buried in the details. They become suspicious, and they become more inclined to say no.

Whenever people who want to propose initiatives ask, my advice is, “look, if you want it to pass, try to keep it simple, on the principles. Although you're writing law, don't get greedy and try to write in every single detail about that, because that may make it go down.” The idea that voters are turned off by overly complex things is a general pattern. There are always exceptions, but I think it's generally true.

KRISTAN: Skepticism about ballot complexity doesn't translate into skepticism about the ballot itself. When researchers ask Americans whether they want to vote on issues, the answer is consistent.

JOHN: Americans' views change on things. They're often divided on things. But if you ask, “should people vote on issues?”, every single state, it's a huge majority that says yes, two to one or more. If you ask people, “should we vote on national issues?”, it's two to one as well. This is something that is a rare, actually bipartisan issue, where majorities of both parties [agree]. And it cuts across genders, it cuts across racial ethnic groups and everything. There's tremendous popular support for the idea of voting on issues.

KRISTAN: For John, the goal isn’t a perfect system or process. It’s supporting the conditions that enable more people to be heard.

JOHN: I believe a lot in pluralism in the sense that I believe if people hear all the different voices, then they're more likely to make a right decision.

Governing on Slender Majorities

KRISTAN: Back in 2020, when Colorado voters passed Proposition 114 to reintroduce wolves to the state, 50.91% voted in favor. It was the narrowest margin of any measure on that ballot. John has thought carefully about what it means to govern from a margin that thin.

JOHN: It's very hard to do democracy in a situation where you're super polarized, where it looks like in that initiative, it's basically 50/50. A little more turnout by one side would've gone the other way. It's very problematic because doing policies on such slender majorities like that leads to instability in your political system.

Thomas Jefferson had a saying [that] you really shouldn't base major policy changes on slender majorities. And I think his intuition was that if you're going to change something, you should get a big group. It should be something that people are convinced of. And the reason is that if you have a tiny win, then the group that lost thinks, “maybe we can rerun this and I'll win next time.” And so, they start to spend all their time trying to rerun that. And then if they do win, then the other side is going to try to do it. And the issue tends to consume everybody, and it doesn't get resolved. But these battles, if they get fought out over long periods of time, can be corrosive to the body politic. Part of me just wonders: is there a policy that you could get most people on both sides to agree to?

But it ultimately relies on the goodwill of the majority to respect that they won't always be the majority. People just have to be reasonable in some sense. And it's getting harder and harder to be reasonable these days because it's such a polarized world, and people are angry, and they don't think the other side is acting in good faith. But democracy really does require, at some level, trying to find middle ground and being willing to compromise a little bit, even if you have the power to do what you want.

Direct Democracy Challenges

KRISTAN: In the five years since Proposition 114 passed, Colorado has seen litigation, legislative hearings, and ongoing disputes about the implementation, which is why John's thinking about ongoing reforms matters.

JOHN: We should never – and this goes not just for direct democracy, for our representative democracy – we should never say, “Hey, it's perfect.” It's always flawed. We should always be perfecting it. And we always have: for 250 years we've been doing it in this country, we've always modified it. We didn't have direct election of senators, we didn't have women voting. A hundred different things, right? We keep changing it and changing.

The one that I always keep coming back to, which is the weak link of all democracies, is this information thing. Tremendous amounts of money get poured into these campaigns, and people are not foolish, and they're not going to just slavishly vote against their interest because they see a hundred commercials. They're not that foolish. But again, one-sided things on complex issues, which don't already have immediate answers, can be a problem.

KRISTAN: One of the issues that concerns him is the cost of even getting a measure on the ballot in the first place.

JOHN: It's pretty expensive to get a measure on the ballot right now in most states. You have to get paid petition signature collectors. For those who aren't familiar with this, you have to hit a target number of signatures.

KRISTAN: In Colorado, that number is currently 124,238 signatures, which is calculated by taking 5% of the votes cast for the Office of Secretary of State in the last general election.

JOHN: You have to go collect signatures, stand out in front of shopping malls, and so forth. Nobody ever does that with volunteers. Everybody hires paid petitioners to go out and do that. It costs money. And as legislators make it more and more difficult to collect signatures, it costs more and more money. So one thing I'm a little bit concerned about is that we don't want to get in a situation where only rich people and rich organizations could put proposals on the ballot. I'm not so much worried that voters will then be forced to do what these people say because they can vote these things down if they don't like them. So I'm not worried that rich people get to write all the laws, but I'm worried that non-rich people won't get to bring their issues to the table.

I think Colorado's pretty good, like a number of other states, in terms of having a little bit of neutral information coming from official bodies out there for the voters to see. Some states don’t even do that. Some people have been exploring these idea of “citizen assemblies” where they'll try to take a randomly selected group of a hundred people and call them in for a weekend, put them up at a hotel and have experts of both sides go in and tell them the different views, and then have them vote at the end of the day what they think. And then they publicize this information so that voters can see what a randomly selected group of their peers who heard both sides thought. That's a really interesting idea, as well as a way to get information out to voters if they distrust some of these other sources.

Voting on National Issues

KRISTAN: Colorado is one of the more active [direct democracy] states. Since 1960, Colorado ranks third for total number of citizen-led ballot measures, with California and Oregon ranking as number one and two. But zooming out, the United States is unique when it comes to direct voting on national issues compared to other democratic countries.

JOHN: Basically, all other [democratic] countries in the world do, except for us. And they point out correctly that we pride ourselves on being the pioneer of democracy, which we are, but we actually have one of the more limited forms in the world now in terms of this, because we don't let people vote on national issues.

Now, if you want to let voters actually vote on laws nationally, that is super hard because you'd have to amend the Constitution. So, I don't really think that's at all practical to think of as a goal at this point. But what is practical is to have advisory votes. You could ask people, “Do you think you should provide a path to citizenship for dreamers?” or something like that. Or “Do you think you should build a border wall?” You could ask people advisory questions. It's not binding; it doesn't make law. Congress is free to ignore it, but at least the people get a vote. And I presume that if there was an issue and 65% said, “We want you to do X,” they're going to actually pay some attention.

There were proposals that were introduced in Congress in the 1980s. Somebody would set up a commission, and what the commission would do would find, every five years or every two years, three questions that would go for a vote of the American people. And I think that would be a really healthy thing to do, because I think we know, unambiguously, Americans would like to vote on issues.

I'm a big believer in innovation experimentation. There's really no downside to doing that. If it doesn't work, if we decide that's not a good idea, we can stop doing it. And it's just a matter of the Congress deciding they want to consult with the American people. But it seems pretty clear that neither party wants to do that. The way it's more likely to happen, I suspect – and this is the way that initiatives came around to the states – is that a governor came in and said, “I really want to do this,” and put some muscle behind it. I can imagine one day, one president might say, “Hey, I want to call a vote on this,” and somehow get Congress to go along with that. I'm pretty sure we'll do it at some point simply because 65% of Americans say they want it and pretty much all other democracies do it. Democracy has been expanding over time, not contracting.

The Volatility and Restrictions to Direct Democracy

KRISTAN: There is a common narrative that has surfaced over the past decade about the global state of democracy: that democracy is backsliding. The indicators that would show this are mixed. But the talking point remains prominent. John was curious about this idea as it relates to states within the U.S. So in 2025, he published a paper called Direct Democracy: Backsliding, where he looked at data from 1955-2024, on whether state governments had altered laws to impede the use of initiatives and referendums.

JOHN: There are these groups that construct these indices of democracy, and they usually do it at the national level. They've been telling the same story for about the last ten years in that it's a story of democratic backsliding across the globe. Countries seem not to be doing quite as well on these indices. So that led people to look down in the states, at how the individual states are doing as far as democracy.

And just for people who aren't familiar with these, they'll look at all kinds of little individual indicators that they think might be important. How easy is it to vote? How long are the polls kept open? How fair is the vote counting? So, they'll identify a bunch of individual little pieces of things and then give them point values and add them up to get an overall index of how well things are doing.

I was interested in this because, in the wake of some of these think tanks that had been issuing these democracy backsliding results, there was a spate of stories that suggested that states were curtailing initiative rights. And there is no doubt that that has been happening. We've seen a number of state legislatures attempt to make it harder to use the process. In terms of the ways they might do this: they might try to increase the signature requirements, they might try to impose costs on petitioners, require them [for example], to do training or to pay fees or to restrict where they can go, or make it harder for propositions to get approved.

KRISTAN: In the wake of some of these stories and reports, John was curious if this was a trend, so he pored through legal provisions for the past 70 years to index all of the votes related to direct democracy.

JOHN: What I found is that there has not been any backsliding. There's volatility. It kind of goes up, it kind of goes down a little bit, [but] the current period is not particularly different than any other period. But the other thing that was interesting is that although there's no backsliding, there is a continual chipping away at direct democracy by legislatures throughout the entire period. Going back [to the] 1960s, legislatures are always coming up with ideas of ways to make the process harder to use.

KRISTAN: Out of the 26 states that vote on initiatives and referendums, he found that for about every four proposals to restrict direct democracy, there was one proposal supporting its expansion. To put this into context, there were 95 of these types of proposals in the last 70 years. And while all democratic systems have guardrails, the question John keeps returning to is whether those guardrails are principled, or whether they're about something else.

JOHN: Making direct democracy harder to use isn't necessarily a bad thing. We restrict democracy in a variety of ways that we think are desirable. We don't let children vote. That's a restriction on democracy, but we think it makes sense, right? Just the fact that they're restricting it doesn't necessarily mean it's bad. I was really just trying to capture whether they are restricting it systematically.

My own view, having seen a lot of these anecdotes and looked at a lot of these cases, is that the arguments that are often given for restricting it are very implausible in many cases. They claim to be solving a problem that isn't a problem. There are often restrictions on petitioners that are offered in the name of protecting voters from fraud. I've never seen one compelling study that shows there's a worrisome amount of fraud. Now we know that when people collect signatures, people write in fake names. They write Mickey Mouse; we know that happens. But that happens for candidate petitions as well, and you can verify signatures. Nobody's shown that this really has had any harm on the democratic process. We often see things mentioned as reasons for restrictions that I don't think most people who looked at it would be convinced that that's good.

KRISTAN: One instance that played out quite publicly was in Ohio in 2023. After the Supreme Court passed the Dobbs decision, which returned abortion regulation to the states, the Ohio legislature passed a bill banning most abortions. In response, abortion rights advocates moved to amend the state constitution via a ballot initiative for the upcoming November 2023 election. Then, in a move explicitly aimed at making it harder for the pending abortion rights initiative to pass, the legislature put a measure on the spring ballot to raise the threshold for approving an initiative from 50% tp 60% of the vote, plus increasing signature requirements. Ohio voters rejected the measure by 57%. Three months later, they passed the abortion rights amendment by nearly the same margin.

JOHN: [The legislators] were very upfront; they were trying to restrict it, not because of a principled notion about the process itself, but because they really don't like what the people might choose.

KRISTAN: A similar dynamic is showing up related to partisan gerrymandering across a number of states, including in California, where the legislature used the initiative process to override an independent citizen redistricting commission for partisan advantage.

JOHN: I think it's good for democracy not to have these district lines be manipulated by politicians. I like that in principle, but it runs against voters’ self-interest, so I'm not going to be surprised if they undo all of these things in the near term.

Look, I have preferences over parties and policies, but my animating thing is just to make democracy work.

Closing

KRISTAN: It’s a false dichotomy to think of direct democracy either as dangerous or as always good. Research shows that direct democracy paired with representative democracy can complement each other. Besides, there is no perfect design for governing, but rather democracy should be seen as a constant work in progress.

As of this recording, the wolf conversation is still running wild throughout many places across Colorado. The debates haven't been resolved, from the commission hearings to the legislature. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing, because we live in a democracy, and debate about values and what’s working and what’s not is what we should be doing. It shows that people are engaged. Plus, what I also hear are conversations between neighbors across divides that sound productive and supportive, focusing on solutions and shared values. So, I asked John what he makes of everything that’s going on nationally right now and where he finds hope.

JOHN: Our democracy in this country is under a lot of stress now. Everybody knows that. There's a lot of unease about where things are going, and obviously, it's not just the political side. Technology is changing, international relations are changing, everything's kind of moving right now. So, I think it's good that people start talking about these things, but it's also good because this is one of the things that works and that everybody agrees upon. There's bipartisan agreement that voting on issues is a good thing, so it's good to bring it to people's attention. I don't think we're going to magically solve the polarization problem or the things that are going on there, but you don't really wave a magic wand and solve it. You solve it by moving forward on a bunch of small things.

I think that it's great that Colorado does this. It's a way that lets people participate in their own government. Having people think about this – think through the pros and cons about this, how we can do this right – I think it's a great thing and in some small way, contributes to making our democracy better. As Americans, we're very proud of our democracy. But it doesn't sustain and run itself on its own. Every generation has to commit to the principles, understand why they're doing it, and think about how we can even make it better, and everybody kind of tweaks it. So, I think these sorts of talks, these discussions, asking these hard questions about it, are the way that we further entrench our commitment to this thing, which has worked very well for us for 250 years.

KRISTAN: Laws of Notion is a production of the Institute for Science and Policy at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. To learn more, visit lawsofnotion.org. I’m your host Kristan Uhlenbrock. This episode was produced by me, Tricia Waddell, and Jordan Marks. Sound design by Seth Samuel. Original music composed and performed by Brett Kretzer with Andy Reiner and by Dr. Joy Adams. Until next time, take care.

Bonus Episode 1: Saint or Sinner: An Interview with David Mech