Description
This paper investigates the puzzle of how and why political actors delegitimise direct democratic processes by calling for boycotts. While previous research has identified factors such as the presence of turnout quorums as potential key tactical motivations for boycotting parties, these studies have mostly been purely experimental designs or focussed on single countries or referendum cases. This paper sheds new light on referendum boycotts, taking a broader comparative perspective by mapping all cases globally where any political actor has called for a boycott since 1990. Using this data, along with multinomial regression analyses, we firstly propose a new typology of referendum boycotts based on the qualitative justifications of boycotting actors. Additionally, we find that contextual factors of democratic status, issue type, and turnout quorums play a significant role in shaping the explicit motivations of boycotting parties. We argue that central to all boycott motivations, however, is the concept of legitimisation.
