Research Paper
Evaluating ballot initiative support for legalised marijuana: The case of Washington

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2018.02.010Get rights and content

Abstract

Background

In 2012, Washington and Colorado became the first U.S. states to legalise recreational marijuana. By 2016, eight states and the District of Columbia had legalised recreational marijuana, with more expected to consider it in 2018. Despite this trend, little academic research explains what drives ballot-initiative vote choice on marijuana legalisation.

Methods

This paper uses a pre-election random sample voter survey to examine the individual characteristics that correlated with Washington voters’ support for legal recreational marijuana.

Results

We find that voting on marijuana ballot initiatives largely reflects public opinion about marijuana and is particularly shaped voters’ political ideology, party affiliation, religious affiliation and practice, and education. Notably, we find that those reporting experiences (i.e., someone they know) with the criminal justice system are more supportive of legalisation than those who do not.

Conclusion

We conclude that marijuana legalisation voting behavior generally aligns with public opinion on the issue. However, one key aspect of Washington’s legalisation campaign–the criminal injustices of marijuana illegality–helped shape Washington state voting behavior. Further research is needed to examine if, when, and in what contexts criminal justice campaign themes are likely to strengthen or undermine future states’ marijuana legalisation efforts.

Introduction

In 1996, California voters passed Proposition 215 with 56 percent of the vote, making it the first U.S. state to legalise medical marijuana. Since then, twenty-seven states and the District of Columbia have passed laws (either via ballot initiative or legislation) that allow the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes (see Appendix A Table A1 for a list of states). In 2010, California became the first state in recent years to consider legalising marijuana for recreational use. That year, voters rejected Proposition 19 by a seven-point margin (46.5 in favor, 53.5 opposed). Two years later (November 2012), voters in Washington and Colorado decisively approved the legalisation of recreational marijuana in their states (both with 55 percent of the vote). They became the first two states to legalise the recreational use of marijuana, initiating a wave of state-level policy diffusion to other states (Boehmke & Witmer, 2004; Mintrom & Vergari, 1998; Shipan & Volden, 2008). In 2014, voters in Alaska, Oregon and the District of Columbia elected to legalise marijuana for private recreational consumption. Even as these states struggled to address policy challenges introduced by their new marijuana laws, five additional states placed recreational marijuana initiatives on their 2016 ballots: California, Arizona, Nevada, Maine, and Massachusetts. That November, voters in all but one of those five states (Arizona) legalised recreational marijuana. At the time of this research, eight states and the District of Columbia allow, regulate and tax the use of recreational marijuana.1

Public support for expanding marijuana legalisation to include recreational use is continuing to grow nationwide (see Fig. 1) and is at an all-time high (Geiger, 2016; Swift, 2016). Today, as many as sixty percent of Americans support legalising recreational use. All age groups–including older voters–currently register higher levels of support for legal recreational marijuana than they did in 2003 or 2005 (Swift, 2016). This comes at a time when the United States’ “war on drugs” is under scrutiny for enabling racially biased arrests (ACLU, 2013) and for contributing to the disproportionate mass incarceration of non-violent minority drug offenders (Alexander, 2012). California’s Proposition 64–the initiative that legalised recreational marijuana use in 2016–promised to “stop ruining people’s lives for marijuana” (State of California, 2016). Advocates of legalisation are increasingly highlighting the criminal injustices enabled by existing drug laws and enforcement practices.

Given these recent ballot-initiative successes, scholars and policymakers anticipate an increase in state ballot initiatives to legalise recreational marijuana in 2018 and beyond. Despite these expectations, no academic research to our knowledge has considered what shapes voters’ preferences on ballot-initiative legalisation. Khatapoush and Hallifors (2004) examine how public attitudes have changed as a result of medicinal legalisation. More recently, Schnabel and Sevell (2017) examined how attitudes towards both marijuana legalisation and same-sex marriage have become more favorable over time. However, these articles examine general public attitudes. They do not focus on attitudes among voters considering specific, upcoming marijuana-legalisation ballot initiatives. Unpacking the individual-level drivers of support for legalisation is critical for state policymakers, law-enforcement officials, criminal-justice activists, and marijuana enthusiasts alike as they evaluate if and when to expend political capital and resources on marijuana-legalisation efforts. In states that legalised recreational marijuana, who supported these changes and who opposed them? We begin to answer this question by analysing attitudes among voters in Washington State in the month before Washington’s 2012 ballot initiative.

Research on direct democracy suggests that the demographic patterns and partisanship affiliations that shape ballot-initiative voting behavior can mirror the patterns that shape candidate-centred elections.2 Smith and Tolbert (2001) found that voting behavior on California ballot initiatives that addressed immigration, health care, affirmative action, and medical marijuana largely followed party positions on those issues. Other researchers have found similar results for ballot initiatives on term limits, gun safety, affirmative action and English language-only initiatives, with voters largely mirror their parties’ line on the relevant issue (Chavez, 1998; Citrin, Reingold, Walters, & Green, 1990; Donovan, 1993; Donovan & Snipp, 1994; Joslyn & Haider-Markel, 2000; Smith & Tolbert, 2001). Examining fifty ballot initiatives in thirteen states, Branton (2003) found that left-right voting patterns shaped individual voter preferences on a variety of issues–including medical marijuana–across all states in the study.

This research suggests that voter preferences will covary with their political parties’ positions, which can provide voters with shortcuts when their own knowledge or perspectives of a particular issue is lacking (Green et al., 2004Green, Palmquist, & Schickler, 2004; Lewis-Beck, 2009; Poole & Rosenthal, 2000; Sundquist, 2011). Because the Republican Party and its state affiliates tend to oppose marijuana legalisation more than actors within the Democratic Party, we might expect Republican partisans to oppose marijuana legalisation at higher rates than their Democrat or independent counterparts. This is indeed the case. Previous research routinely identifies a partisan split on legalisation opinion (Geiger, 2016; Schnabel & Sevell, 2017; Swift, 2016). In addition to cuing partisan allegiances, marijuana legalisation may well cue moral ideas and normative considerations among voters (Biggers, 2014); thus, we expect a strong ideological split among voters.

The social relevance and implications of marijuana legalisation extend far beyond individual recreational use. Legalising marijuana has the potential to significantly impact the U.S. criminal justice system, especially among the non-violent, disproportionately minority convicted drug offenders. We therefore expect that voters’ experiences with the criminal justice system will have a stronger impact on attitudes about marijuana legalisation than they would on other direct democracy measures. Thornhill (2011) found that experiences with the criminal justice system affected African American attitudes toward legalisation. African American communities are disproportionately affected by drug laws in the United States (Alexander, 2012; Provine, 2008; Thornhill, 2011). Although some surveys suggest that African Americans overall tend to be less supportive of marijuana legalisation than the general population, Thornhill found that, in cities with the highest levels of race-specific arrests, support for marijuana legalisation among African Americans was nearly 80 percent higher than it was in cities with the lowest levels of race- specific arrests. High race-specific arrest rates make it more likely that black voters may know someone who has been arrested for drug violations. Thus, these findings offer some preliminary evidence than minority-voter experiences with the criminal justice system may have a significant influence on support for marijuana legalisation.

We examine the individual characteristics that correlate with voters’ support for–and opposition to–the legalisation of recreational marijuana in Washington, which has been at the vanguard of state-based marijuana legalisation.3 Our data come from the 2012 Washington Poll, taken in the month before Washington’s 2012 approval of recreational marijuana. The remainder of this article seeks to identify the demographic characteristics most often associated with favorable attitudes toward legalising recreational marijuana in Washington state, with particular attention given to partisanship, political ideology, and experiences with the criminal justice system. Next, we introduce the Washington’s 2012 ballot initiative and political context. This is followed by a discussion of existing public opinion findings. We then discuss our data and methods, followed by a section on results based on bivariate and multivariate regression analysis. Finally, we provide a discussion about the study’s limitations; and conclude with remarks about the study’s implications for future marijuana ballot initiatives.

Section snippets

Washington ballot initiative 502

Washington State leans stably Democratic (Burns & Johnson, 2013). The Democratic Party’s candidate won the state in the last seven presidential elections. The last five Washington governors (including sitting Governor Jay Inslee), both current senators, and six of its ten members of the House of Representatives are Democrats. The portion of the state west of the Cascade Mountains, including King County’s Seattle metropolitan area, tends to be Washington’s progressive stronghold, relative to

Public opinion and voting behavior: theories and hypotheses

The lack of cohesive opposition to I-502 likely reflects shifts in public opinion about marijuana legalisation, which have been trending more favorable over the last decade (see Fig. 1). Support for marijuana legalisation has grown considerably among Americans of all ages from the 1970s to today, with these time-period effects becoming initially evident in the mid-1980s (Campbell, Twenge, & Carter, 2017). Previous research has shown that public opinion on marijuana legalisation is shaped by

Data and methods

We use the 2012 Washington Poll to assess public opinion about the legalisation of recreational marijuana in the month before the general election, which was fielded in October 2012 (Barreto & Parker, 2012). The poll is a random-sample telephone survey of n = 1560 respondents selected from the Washington voter file. The poll has a margin of error of +/−2.48 percent and is weighted by gender, age, race, and education. Respondents were contacted via landline or cellular telephone, according to

Results

Most polling research from media outfits on marijuana legalisation is limited to bivariate analyses and therefore does not account for possible confounding factors. We report these bivariate relationships and then clarify which variables maintain their significance in a multivariate model.10 Fig. 2a displays the bivariate relationships between political party, political

Limitations

This paper is one of the first to analyse voting behavior in the context of a marijuana legalisation ballot initiative. While our findings are important and should be built upon and studied in legalisation efforts in other U.S. states, our study is not without limitations. First, the Washington Poll surveys registered voters only, as such, we are missing the opinions of adult non-voters. While this is proper procedure in understanding what drives voting behavior, specifically, we want to be

Discussion

The United States has seen a striking influx of marijuana legalisation. In just five years and three election cycles, eight states and the District of Columbia elected to allow its recreational use. Marijuana may be on a path towards widespread acceptance and even national legalisation. Despite these trends, our analysis finds significant opposition to legalisation among certain demographics, most notably political conservatives and respondents with high levels of religiosity.

This analysis

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