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Research to date into the drivers of public support for participative democracy has offered limited insights into different national contexts. The present article addresses this gap in the literature. It empirically examines the sway of citizens’ appraisal of the state of democracy in the country, their political interest and personal socio-economic positions as well as the objective national socio-economic environment on public attitudes towards direct democracy. Using European Social Surveys (ESS) data, the results in this paper demonstrate that citizens’ political interest explains more about the public attitudes towards direct democracy than citizens’ assessment of the performance of the political regime, institutions and actors, and education. They also show that individuals in countries with integral proportional representation voting systems are more likely to support the use of referendums for key issues than those in countries without such systems. Education and income are found to have only a relatively modest impact on this support. The findings finally suggest that apart from a country’s level of press freedom, no other objective national socio-economic indicator tends to sway popular support for participative democracy. In the light of these findings, implications are drawn.

Interrogating the popularity of direct democracy among European national publics