ABSTRACT
The European literature on voting behavior in direct democratic votes has flourished since the 1990s, as a result of the growing number of referendums on European integration. Moreover, empirical records support the view that voters with low levels of information tend to use shortcuts to emulate the voting behavior of best-informed persons. Among the many criticisms that were voiced against the three classical paradigms of electoral research two deserve closer attention, since they also contributed to the renewal of research on voting behavior in direct democracy. The criticism regards the homogeneous – and somehow simplistic – conception of voters on which the classical schools rely. In direct democratic votes, the context takes mainly two forms: voters' environment and the characteristics of the proposal submitted to the people and related political campaign. In Switzerland, as in the United States, the evaluation of voters' level of political competence relies on factual knowledge questions asked in survey polls.
