Electoral Competition and the Frequency of Initiative Use in

To what extent has direct democracy, specifically the ballot initiative process, served to substitute for perceived deficiencies of representative democracy in the United States? Despite extensive literatures on both direct democ-racy and democratic representation, there exist very few direct evaluations of the interplay between the two. I examine whether variation in the fre-quency of a state’s initiative use is related to the extent to which that state’s representative institutions lack electoral competition. I find that initiative states with a higher percentage of uncontested elections for representative office see more initiative use than states with more competitive elections, conditional on the ideological divergence between citizens and legislators. The results contribute much to our understanding of the processes driving cycles of initiative use and identify a tangible consequence of the presence of misrepresentative state institutions