Measures of Last Resort: Shaping Policy through Ballot-Based Activism.

Voters in some states are accustomed to lengthy ballots that ask voters to decide on an array of questions, many of which have been placed on the ballot by activists. Many other states rarely ask voters to decide such questions. However, across the United States, activists are increasingly turning to the ballot in an attempt to shape state-level policy. In this paper, we conduct comparative case studies of the political contexts within which labor activists, gun control proponents and opponents, and opponents of same-sex marriage choose to pursue ballot-based strategies. We find that ballot tactics, though they are commonly available and used by a wide variety of movements, are a last resort for activists. Activists typically employ legislative strategies first, turning to the ballot if such strategies are unsuccessful. Ballot tactics are especially attractive when critical or focusing events bring claims to the public's attention and bolster activists' confidence that they can win. These events constitute state- and/or national-level contexts within which activists choose to pursue a state-level ballot strategy. As ballot-based strategies become increasingly common tools within activists' tactical repertoire, we argue that additional scholarly attention must be given to tactics that rely on routine political processes, but that are not quite "politics as usual". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]