Prior to the 1990s, there were few attempts at systematic assessment of the politics of initiatives. Indeed, David Magleby's (1984) Direct Legislation remains the classic demonstration of how direct democracy offers opportunities for rich avenues of study. Direct citizen lawmaking presents us with obvious questions about how people decide when they vote on initiatives, about the prospects for voter competence, about concerns for minority rights, and about how we should value representative democracy. Although these questions may seem obvious, the answers are often somewhat complex. Yet for over a decade after Magleby's book, very few scholarly books were published on direct democracy in the United States.

With renewed use of initiatives, more scholars are now turning their attention to these questions. A number of political scientists, including Richard Ellis and Robert Alexander, have recently focused on questions of a more structural nature, including: How do initiatives affect who gets what from government? Do they make public policy more representative of mass preferences? Do they promote the concerns of narrow economic interests, or broadly based (public) interests? Do they create unique public policies?

As the authors of these two volumes demonstrate, initiatives alter how interest groups might affect a state's public policies. Ellis's approach to direct democracy is particularly engaging. Drawing rich examples and data from the practice of direct democracy in Oregon, Washington, Colorado, and California, he provides ample support for his argument that the initiative process has become dominated by elected officials, interest group elites, and others. Ellis views the growing use of initiatives from a supplyside perspective; rather than reflecting the demands of a discontented mass public, he shows that many initiative proposals are vehicles that these actors use to promote themselves, their candidacies, or their relatively narrow issues. Although these arguments are not particularly new, perhaps no one else has done a better job of supporting them than Ellis.

One of the many things that makes Ellis's book engaging is that his critique of American direct democracy recognizes that the process remains quite popular, and that not only will it continue to shape policy but it may also play an even greater role in the future. Indeed, one of his main case studies of policymaking via the initiative is a sympathetic portrait of Helen Hill, an Oregon resident who used the initiative to rewrite that state's laws on access to adoption records. Hill might represent the classic progressive ideal that concerned citizens can occasionally use the initiative to make policy more responsive to their (or the public's) preferences, and then return to their private affairs.

More common, from Ellis's perspective, are measures bankrolled by well-financed economic groups and those promoted by incumbent politicians and professional initiative activists—with some activists earning their living by being able to keep a healthy number of proposals in the pipeline between election cycles. From his viewpoint, initiative activists promoting their pet policies (often antitax proposals) combine with professional signature gatherers to produce initiatives that may receive a majority of votes, yet serve as a thin reflection of the public's true concerns.

These activists—Bill Sizemore of Oregon, Tim Eyman of Washington, David Bruce of Colorado, and others—are featured here in rich detail. Ellis has conducted masterful interviews with initiative activists and with legislators that offer an entertaining description of their motives and methods. In fact, the tension between state legislators and initiative proponents is probably presented here as well as in any other work. Readers may be struck by how candid legislators are in expressing their disgust with some initiative proponents—even with those they see as ideological partners. Ellis has managed to get his subjects to be open and frank in a manner that is rarely captured by journalists or scholars.

Although recognizing that there was probably never any grassroots-dominated “golden age” of the initiative (Chapter 7), Ellis nonetheless mourns the relative lack of “single-issue political novices” (p. 118), who “spearhead an initiative in order to remedy a social injusticethat has been ignored by an unresponsive political system, and, then, having triumphed over the politicians and special interests, return to the ordinary life of a citizen” (p. 116). Such citizens are out there, he notes, but they lack the resources to buy access to the process. This presents a problem: How might the process be reformed so that initiatives actually reflect citizens’ concerns? At one level, he appeals for citizens to block special interest initiatives, urging that they not sign their petitions.

At another level, Ellis also considers changing the rules about the process of deliberating and voting on initiatives. He evaluates several reforms that could give elected representatives more input, and discusses reforms that would make it more difficult for initiatives to pass. These include a threshold of voter participation required for approval, supermajority vote requirements, and majorities in successive elections. Ellis does a nice job of illustrating that in the Swiss initiative process the legislature plays a greater role in the deliberation over proposals than most American state legislatures do by permitting only indirect initiatives. Recognizing, however, that the voting public will probably not approve the constitutional amendments required to alter their state's beloved initiative process, Ellis ultimately appeals to the courts to be more aggressive in applying the singlesubject rule.

Democratic Delusions is an important book for those seeking to understand debates about how democracy functions in the western United States at the start of the twenty-first century. Ellis leaves us with a portrait of direct democracy distinctly at odds with recent quantitative empirical analysis that suggests that initiatives lead states to adopt policies closer to median voter preferences. He argues, rather, that initiatives distort contemporary policy, and that they played little role in advancing the progressive agenda 90 years ago. However, Ellis is unable to distinguish between the direct effect on policy of an initiative's passing, and the indirect effect it has via reshaping a state's agenda. At times, the argument assumes the process has “a lack of checks on majorities” (p. 139), yet it is also said to produce policies that fail to promote the concerns of majorities. To his credit, he can make sense of this with his comprehensive assessment of initiative use in the United States.

Alexander's brief study focuses on interest group involvement on two initiatives: California's Proposition 5 of 1998, which expanded tribal gambling, and Missouri's Amendment 9 of 1998, which authorized a loose interpretation of what qualified as river-boat gambling (“boats in moats”). He claims that with his findings, “a step has been taken to solve the Populist Paradox” (p. x) that Elisabeth Gerber (1999) has drawn attention to in The Populist Paradox. His read on this paradox is that interest groups “may bypass traditional methods of lobbying in order to directly make public policy” (p. 1). Specifically, he proposes to assess the types of groups involved in initiative politics, the campaign strategies these groups use, and the “impact of interest groups upon initiative campaigns” (p. 7).

Neither Ellis nor Alexander gives readers a clear sense of the proportion of initiatives that appear to be written by wealthy interests seeking to advance their own industry or enhance their ability to make money. Existing literature and Ellis's book, however, cover enough ground to make it clear that such cases are fairly rare; what are more common are wealthy patrons who sponsor initiatives on topics unrelated to their source of wealth (e.g., medical marijuana, taxes on tobacco, school choice) and corporate interests that spend vast sums to defeat initiatives they fear.

Given Alexander's questions, then, his choice of cases seems a bit odd. Although the initiatives in his study were on comparable subjects, they may be the least representative of measures that voters have ever approved. Prop. 5 and Amendment 9 represent rare cases for three reasons: The proponents had nearly unlimited resources (spending on Prop. 5 reached $90 million); the initiative was written to enhance the proponents’ ability to make money; and the initiatives actually passed. Apart from some hand waving about the virtues of case studies (pp. 41–42) and a claim of “gambling being a prototypical issue that energizes the electorate” (p. 43), there is no clear rationalization for selecting these cases to answer the questions the author proposed.

Alexander spends the first three chapters of a six-chapter book prefacing his analysis with tables reproduced from other published works, reviewing literature on initiatives and interest groups, comparing demographics of the two states, and discussing the method to be used in the substantive chapters (4 and 5). The method consists mainly of sifting through media reports of the two campaigns in order to describe each one. Unlike Ellis's work, there is little (if any) direct interviewing. This proves problematic. At several points in Chapter 4, Alexander attributes the success of Prop. 5's proponents (tribal casinos) to their ability to “mobilize more citizens” to campaign door-to-door (pp. 71, 76). He also notes that the $66 million “Yes” campaign “illustrated characteristics of a citizen group” (pp. 62, 77). He notes also that this citizen base, the proponents’ strategy of framing the issue, and “the unique standing of Native Americans in California … pushed them over the edge and won the election” (p. 76).

All of this may be true, but the points are quite debatable, and readers are given no evidence to support such claims. In fact, the primary supporting reference for the “citizen” base of the campaign is a self-promotional article written by the campaign's professional consultant. Alexander's book should prove useful for readers who seek a summary of the context of these two campaigns, but, at the end, it may not provide much in the way of answers to the questions it began with.