What California Can Learn From The Place That Invented The Initiative

BERN, Switzerland — The initiative and referendum arrived in California from Switzerland more than a century ago as tools for citizens to bypass a lobbyist-controlled state capital and make policy themselves.

Ballot measures have become an unofficial fourth branch of government, through which voters settle broad cultural questions like affirmative action and micromanage the state budget. But many Californians now tell pollsters that a system designed to empower them is dangerously dominated by the kind of special-interest money it was created to circumvent.

The place that inspired California’s direct democracy hasn’t become jaded about it. In Switzerland, voters have recently weighed in on everything from increasing pensions and upholding the country’s ambitious climate laws to updating cow horn regulations and defunding the Eurovision Song Contest.

The Swiss are far more positive about this kind of governance than the Californians I encounter while covering ballot measures in the state, who tell me they’re overwhelmed and confused by the questions put before them. But the Swiss more frequently laud a system built around issues rather than parties or politicians. They often say it fosters a consensus-based atmosphere, keeps polarization at bay and diffuses tension by giving individuals trust in their ability to shape policy.

As Switzerland celebrated the 150th anniversary of the world’s first national referendum in 2024, I thought back to the American journalist who helped inform the world of the peculiar politics being practiced in the Alps. After an 1888 trip through Europe, J.W. Sullivan wrote an admiring book that described the initiative (in which citizens can introduce a law) and the referendum (in which they veto one passed by lawmakers) as a cure for the era’s populist and progressive anxieties about the unchecked power of moneyed interests.

Many of those same concerns dominate today’s politics, but in California — one of 24 states to adopt the initiative in the years after Sullivan’s book — direct democracy seems like just another part of the problem rather than a solution. I thought Switzerland might still have something to teach us.

As I retraced Sullivan’s travels through Switzerland last summer, plenty of what I observed was familiar. Party officials, consultants and pollsters in the small, multilingual nation of 8.9 million, too, hatch plans to collect petition signatures, wrestle with explaining complex issue questions in simple terms and face negotiations over legislative counterproposals.

But they almost uniformly believed their system works pretty much the way it should. There are major differences between the two countries that make it impossible to simply export success from one to the other. Nevertheless, I came home with a few things the Golden State ballot measure world could learn from Switzerland.

1. Vote more often.

Since I started reporting on ballot measures in California, I often hear voters complain that there are too many measures on the ballot at once. Last year I covered a ballot featuring 10 statewide issues, which I knew was on the lower side historically — in November 1988, for example, voters faced down 29 questions.

Switzerland has a way to keep the number of measures more manageable: By going to the polls more often. Far more often.

Switzerland typically holds elections on issue questions — separate from its parliamentary elections — once every three months. Voters can encounter initiatives and referendums at three different levels: federal, regional (known as cantonal), and local. Typically between two and four federal-level initiatives and referendums appear on each ballot, along with a handful of cantonal and local measures.

On Nov. 24, the last election day of 2024, voters across Switzerland saw four: one on expanding the country’s highways, two related to housing, and one on a recent amendment to health care law. On the cantonal and local level, the Swiss decided on issues ranging from lowering the voting age to 16 and reforming urban planning processes to reducing regional income taxes and promoting renewable energy production.

Californians, by contrast, are accustomed to voting in statewide elections every two years. In 2011, lawmakers decided to stop including initiatives on primary ballots — so now, with rare exceptions, every statewide measure is jammed onto a biennial general election ballot already overstuffed with presidential, gubernatorial, congressional and legislative races.

Those involved in Swiss direct democracy said the steady pace fosters a more regular engagement with policy issues among the electorate — a chance for citizens to regularly work out their democratic muscles even at the cost of fatigue.

“Democracy can be exhausting in Switzerland,” Adrian Michel, who leads the pro-business Free Democratic Party’s initiative and referendum campaigns, told me in the party’s Bern headquarters one summer morning. The posters lining the walls in German, French and Italian from past initiative campaigns the party had fought, on everything from same-sex marriage to tax reform to relations with the European Union, underscored his point.

This frequency helps to settle policy debates promptly. When Basel decided in mid-September to fund the 2025 Eurovision Song Contest as a host city, the small conservative Federal Democratic Union party began signature-gathering efforts to challenge the move. The party submitted signatures the following month and put the referendum before voters in November. (Voters rejected it, keeping the money in place.)

Swiss referendums typically end up on the ballot within a year of submitting the necessary signatures. In California, it can sometimes take more than twice as long — a period of uncertainty during which a new law is put on hold awaiting voter review. (Swiss initiatives, by contrast, can sometimes take as long or longer to appear on the ballot.)

In Sacramento, lawmakers approved a law to ban the drilling of new oil wells within a certain distance of places like homes and schools in September 2022. When oil interests gathered signatures to overturn it, qualifying for the ballot five months later, the earliest a referendum could reach voters was November 2024.

That has birthed a sordid tactic in California politics: launching a referendum campaign primarily to delay an unfriendly new law. (Drillers ended up pulling their referendum from the 2024 ballot at the latest possible moment, after having effectively purchased a nearly two-year regulatory postponement.) Such a tactic is less potent in Switzerland, where the calendar leaves less room for strategic delay.

A rapid-fire election calendar would be a tough sell in California, where officials struggle to efficiently process votes and quarterly votes would mean already slow counters barely get a break before starting all over again.

“Given the size of the electorate and the size of the state, it would be complicated … at the state level,” said Mark Baldassare, survey director at the Public Policy Institute of California. “But I could see it working to some degree at the local level.”

2. Lower the barriers to entry

On the country’s national holiday in August, I visited an outdoor fair in a Zurich park where an initiative campaign to loosen Switzerland’s notoriously strict citizenship requirements had deployed to hunt for signatures.

“We created this from scratch,” Arbër Bullakaj, one of the initiators of the proposal, told me as we took shelter from a summer rain shower under a tent the initiative had set up. Behind us, volunteers were chatting enthusiastically with beer-toting passersby. “People in our local committees are really active … we have some volunteers who have collected signatures every single day.”

The analogous scene in California, at a farmers’ market or in a big-box store parking lot, would likely feature not enthusiastic true believers but paid signature-gatherers working for firms that specialize in helping would-be campaigns reach the ballot.

Backers of an initiative or referendum in California have six months to gather 546,651 signatures (a number that fluctuates based on the size of the electorate). For a constitutional amendment, the number is even higher: 874,641. It typically costs at least $8 million to clear this logistical hurdle — just to place a question before voters, usually before a dollar has been spent on advertising or other communication.

Swiss campaigners need to submit 100,000 valid signatures to put an initiative on a ballot, a slightly smaller percentage of the population than California requires. More importantly, they have 18 months to collect them. As a result, far fewer turn to professionals: parties and interest groups rely on their existing member base to help boost their numbers, and grassroots movements can feasibly get their causes on the ballot with a volunteer force alone. (The citizenship proposal I followed in Zurich, known as the Democracy Initiative, successfully submitted 135,000 signatures in October.)

“Money plays a role, there’s no question about that,” Urs Leuthard, a journalist with the Swiss broadcaster SRF who moderates the network’s election-day coverage, told me over coffee at the Swiss National Museum. “But I actually believe that in Switzerland it is still possible for organizations with relatively little money to launch initiatives.”

Throughout the rest of the summer and fall, I tracked the volunteers’ conversations in the campaign’s city-based Signal chats. In the Zurich group, they swapped selfies from Swiss trains, cobblestoned city squares and sun-dappled cafe patios, exchanging updates like “I’m going to try to get some signatures at the Zurich Film Festival today, does anyone want to come with me?” and “+76”, marking the number of signatures they had brought in that day.

It was well-organized, but delightfully chaotic in a way that would seem unimaginable in California. Here campaigns occasionally begin the process hoping they can gather enough signatures with volunteers, but quickly come to realize there’s no virtual way to do it in the six-month window without paying dearly for help. More than 30 initiative campaigns that submitted paperwork with state officials to collect signatures for the 2024 ballot did not ultimately qualify for it.

That fact gets at the crux of one of Californians’ other complaints about the initiative system: In Sacramento, changing the law via the citizenry has become so costly that only the most well-funded interests, like oil companies and casino owners, even have a shot at qualifying something for the ballot (let alone running a statewide campaign to persuade a majority to vote for it).

Bob Hertzberg, a former Assembly speaker and Senate majority leader who has been involved in efforts to reform the ballot measure process both in and out of the Legislature said one option to address the issue would be to set a per-voter maximum for each ballot-measure committee’s spending.

“We’ve got to get more truth in this whole process because it’s so easy to manipulate with just huge amounts of money,” he told me.

As the number of initiatives in Switzerland has steadily grown, some critics of the system have suggested raising the number of required signatures. (This might be more urgent if it ever becomes possible to sign a petition digitally; currently, an ink signature is required.) But reforming the initiative process to make it less accessible is a third rail of Swiss politics.

“Nobody does that because it is a dismantling of democracy,” Michel told me. “If anyone tried to suggest it, they’d be politically dead.”

3. Let legislators strike back

I spend most of my time covering efforts to reach the ballot in California, but what felt like every waking hour of my time in June was spent following a saga to remove something from last fall’s ballot.

Proposition 36, a proposal to strengthen criminal penalties, reached the November ballot after a group of law enforcement and business interests banded together to fight what they saw as an epidemic of retail theft and drug abuse. Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democratic legislative leaders desperately wanted to see it gone because of the potential harm to party candidates who would have to share a ballot with the initiative.

So they pursued a legislative deal, offering to pass a law giving new prosecutors new tools to combat retail theft — and even the possibility of putting the existing proposal before voters in a future year — in exchange for the proponents spiking their 2024 plans. When the proponents held firm, Newsom briefly considered placing his own competing measure on the ballot. (Prop 36 went on to pass by a 37-point margin.)

Fresh off that experience during my time in Switzerland, I couldn’t help but wonder how things might have gone differently if we had a system like theirs. At both the federal and cantonal levels, Switzerland’s process allows the legislature to introduce its own counterproposal. If the initiative’s backers don’t rescind their proposal, the legislature’s counterproposal appears on the ballot directly alongside the original initiative.

When that happens, voters check three boxes: A yes-or-no vote on the original initiative, a yes-or-no vote on the legislative counterproposal, and then a third question asking which measure they’d prefer to implement if both pass.

Although this process has been in place for decades, it has been fully used only a handful of times. The most recent was in 2010, when voters approved an initiative to deport foreigners who had committed crimes — and rejected the parliament’s counterproposal, a more moderate version that removed some of the initiative’s proposed crimes for which a foreign national could be deported.

“What it does is it forces parliament to listen ... to strong parts of citizenry and to enter into a dialogue,” Hans-Peter Schaub, a political scientist with the University of Bern who runs the initiative database Swissvotes.ch, told me in Bern. “And this [parliamentary] counterproposal is exactly this kind of thing: ‘Yeah, well, we agree with some of those demands, but not with everything. So we have another idea how to how to solve it, and then negotiate.’”

In the decade since California began allowing proponents to remove qualified measures up to five months before Election Day, business and labor interests have learned to wield the threat of initiative as leverage to force the governor and legislators to come to the negotiating table over often highly technical questions around worker rights, environmental restrictions and the minimum wage.

That happens in Switzerland, too, a process that also keeps plenty of qualified initiatives from ever appearing on the ballot. But when a competing legislative measure ends up on the ballot, listing the options side-by-side on the ballot would clarify voters’ choices and allow them to more easily reach the policy outcome they prefer.

4. Ditch the TV ads

Ask Californians what they know about a given year’s crop of ballot measures and they’ll probably tell you about the myriad TV spots they’ve seen leading up to Election Day. Last year, I heard friends and family frequently mention the barrage of advertising over Proposition 33, the rent-control measure that became a high-dollar battle between its AIDS Healthcare Foundation backers and opponents at the California Apartment Association.

The Swiss airwaves, by contrast, are mercifully free of ads related to initiatives and referendums. That’s because the country has banned political advertising on both TV and radio, from candidate and initiative campaigns alike. (Campaigns can advertise on digital media, however, as well as in newspapers and via outdoor posters.)

Like the signature requirements and timeframe, the lack of TV ads helps keep the price of initiative campaigns down compared to their sometimes-bloated California counterparts. In 2020, Uber, Lyft and DoorDash spent more than $220 million on a measure reclassifying rideshare drivers as freelancers, more money than any other statewide campaign in American history, almost all of it on advertising.

The lack of TV advertising in Switzerland, combined with the fact that elections typically focus on a small number of initiatives and referendums at a time, contributes to a more substantive debate about them.

“The media cannot avoid writing and reporting on policy issues and, I think, that is somehow different from a purely representative system,” said Heike Scholten, a Zurich-based political consultant who works on initiative and referendum campaigns. “It has implications for the way in which we debate politically, and I think that’s very valuable for a democracy.”

Ahead of the most recent election, the national broadcaster hosted an hour-long special on the policy details of the highway expansion measure, and newspapers like the Neue Zürcher Zeitung published dozens of articles and interviews about each measure.

“The intensity of the debate at the end is what makes the quality of direct democracy,” said Lukas Golder, co-director of GFS Bern, a public opinion firm that polls on Swiss initiatives and referendums. “We still have quite good coverage of free media, and the broadcaster [SRF] is another element that keeps up this debate quality. So that also helps to stabilize the system.”

Doing away with TV ads in the American context feels like a non-starter. Gale Kaufman, a veteran ballot measure consultant, said the cuts to media in California, leaving the state without the robust local media scene it has had in the past, would make it difficult to have Swiss-style coverage here.

“If you took television ads away, the question is why. If that meant that every single local station that still exists on broadcast and radio, as part of their weekend or two days a week, had an hour of discourse … if you helped formulate how to do that, it would take a while but maybe it would get better,” she said. “But just to get rid of TV ads means there’d be even less information, not more.”

5. Give citizens other ways to shape policy

Across German-speaking Switzerland, towns and cantons have held in-person votes called Landsgemeinde — direct, in-person citizen votes to approve everything from budgets to local policy — since the late Middle Ages. Some have continued the tradition into the modern era.

The cantons of Glarus and Appenzell each gather their citizens in large public squares one day every year. Anyone can voice their support or objection for a particular piece of legislation or budget item, and the result is determined by a show of hands. It’s sort of like the Iowa caucuses, except instead of picking a candidate attendees choose from a full range of policy proposals.

This centuries-old tradition means direct democracy is embedded across the Swiss political system. Sean Mueller, a political scientist at the University of Lausanne, told me that participating in Landsgemeinde while growing up in Glarus is a big part of why he decided to focus his research on his country’s unique political system.

“You go, you hear, you can speak up if you’re not happy, you decide, and that’s it,” he said. “That’s what democracy is about: trusting each other and working together. So asking citizens to trust politicians, but not trusting them in return, feels off. I don’t know how people get away with [not doing] it in other countries, to be honest.”

There’s been plenty of discussion in California, and the U.S. more broadly, about how to give people more of a direct say in their politics. Some states, including neighboring Oregon, have launched citizens’ assemblies. Randomly selected groups of people who come together for a specific number of sessions to debate an issue and come up with a list of concrete policy recommendations.

Baldassare, the survey director at PPIC, said he could imagine holding annual advisory votes in California, where voters weigh in on issues in a way that tells lawmakers what their policy priorities are. He, along with Hertzberg and others who have thought about how to reform California’s initiative process, say there are ways to get people more involved, whether via advisory votes or citizens’ assemblies.

“The elements of Swiss direct democracy could theoretically be used everywhere,” said Leuthard, the Swiss journalist. “It’s about political participation — that’s not rocket science, and that’s not something completely abnormal, it’s something we all do as citizens. We want to have a say, to be involved in these decisions.”