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With the adoption of new constitutions in Eastern and Central Europecontaining numerous provisions allowing for referendums, cross-nationalcomparative work on the policy effects of referendums across theEuropean continent have become possible. This allows us to close animportant gap in the literature on referendums, namely to assess theconsequences of these institutions at the national level. Moreprecisely, we wish to assess whether the well-documented policy effectsat the subnational level (e.g., in the United States or Switzerland)carry over to the national level. Some of these subnational studiessupport the theoretically derived implication that the possibility ofreferendums leads to policies more closely reflecting the voters'wishes. The present paper provides empirical tests of this, but contraryto other empirical studies so far, proposes a comparative analysis atthe national level. For several policies in the domain of laborregulation we show that the presence of institutions allowing forreferendums reduces the difference between policy outcomes and thevoters' wishes as assessed in surveys. We carry out these tests on thebasis of several datasets covering a range of mainly Western countries,and rely on a diverse set of methodologies to assess policy outcomes. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]