2016 provides a useful baseline for understanding the relationship between ballot initiatives and the state of democracy. “Overall, the total number of statewide ballot measures, including those put on the ballot by state legislatures, has been declining pretty consistently over the last decade and a half,” Josh Altic, the director of the ballot-initiatives project at Ballotpedia, an online political encyclopedia, said. “The number of citizen initiatives has been decreasing since 2006 along with them. But in 2016, we kind of had this turnaround, and all of a sudden there was an undeniable increase in the interest and the number of those initiatives.”

That year, the number of citizen initiatives that made state ballots (71) was more than double the total amount from 2014. That’s despite 2016 following the long-term trend of shrinking ballot measures overall—which has been driven mostly by a precipitous decline in the number of constitutional amendments proposed by legislatures. The 71 initiatives represent a high-water mark in elections over the past decade—meaning that even as state legislatures steadily put fewer and fewer constitutional amendments and state statutes up for a vote, direct democracy (in some ways) still had a banner year in 2016.

One reason for that relative success is procedural. Many states’ minimum-signature requirements for petitions are based on a percentage of the number of overall votes in the last election. That means that lower voter turnout in one election makes it easier to get petitions approved in the next election. 2016 was ripe for citizen reforms, in part, because in 2014, overall turnout across the country was the lowest in seven decades.

But there could be other factors at work here, too. Perhaps in connection to the previous election’s record-low turnout, voters did not trust their elected officials to get the job done, and thus turned to direct democracy. “People were kind of fed up with either gridlock or opposition in state legislatures,” Altic explained. “You also have the narrative of the swing towards Republican control over state legislatures since 2010. There’s obviously been a big shift in that direction, so you see a lot of progressive citizen initiatives. That’s how you get these things done if you don’t have the seats in the legislature.”

The kinds of ballot initiatives that were certified in 2016—especially those that eventually passed that November—provide a snapshot of which policies were animating American political discourse at the time. They also show where a bipartisan consensus among voters on a specific policy wasn’t matched by members of the legislature. Marijuana decriminalization and legalization initiatives saw major nationwide success, reflecting ongoing shifts among Republican voters toward support for legalization. Several states also voted to increase the minimum wage, and statewide health-care and gun-control measures also passed.