The Impact of Direct Democracy on Society - Universität St.Gallen

– 230 –average student is found for the share <strong>of</strong> Protestants and a performance lowering effect for theshare <strong>of</strong> poor persons. Moreover, cantonal population appears influential. In addition, theseresults are similar to the findings for mathematics. In contrast to mathematics, however, noaggregate peer impact seems to exist for the share <strong>of</strong> highly educated persons, but adeleterious impact is observed for the share <strong>of</strong> people over 60. For natural science, quantileregression results are close to the findings in the OLS model. For more detailed regressionoutput tables, the reader is referred to the Appendix for natural science (table 10.2).<strong>The</strong> Structural Form<strong>The</strong> structural form tests the institutional influence <strong>of</strong> direct democracy when revenue-driveninputs are controlled for. For an average student among the 1,100 test takers, the coefficient <strong>of</strong>the variable <strong>of</strong> interest is positive but insignificant (see table 10.1). <strong>The</strong> quantile regressionresults in the structural form for the estimated quantiles corroborate the OLS results byrevealing no significant impact for any quantile (see table 10.3). In addition, the hypothesis <strong>of</strong>a joint significance for all estimated quantiles cannot be supported, which corroborates theobservation that the institutional impact is negligible for the entire distribution. This result canbe interpreted to mean that filtering out the influence through the subfederal budgetarychannel reveals no impact beyond the one; that is, a reallocation <strong>of</strong> the means betweenstudents with differing levels <strong>of</strong> academic achievement.As figure 6 shows, for the entire distribution, the coefficient <strong>of</strong> the institution <strong>of</strong> directlegislation fluctuates around the OLS estimate, which intersects the ordinate at 6.25. A test forequality <strong>of</strong> coefficients for the all estimated quantiles jointly shows that the effect <strong>of</strong> directdemocracy is <strong>of</strong> equal size for all students 260 . Again, interested readers can find more detailedinformation on the remaining determinants in the Appendix (see table 10.3).As regards the remaining sociodemographic, peer, and cantonal covariates in the OLS model,as already observed in the reduced form <strong>of</strong> the model, female student gender is associatedwith lower academic achievement. In contrast to the structural form result, the selectivity <strong>of</strong>school is found not to be influential. This observation is similar to that for mathematics.Again, it is conjectured that it is through the resource channel at the school and class level thatselectivity unfolds its influence in the reduced model.260 In addition, a pairwise test for equality for the estimated percentiles was never rejected.