I think futurity.org is rather overselling this study by the University of Buffalo:
Ballot initiatives, long thought to encourage democratic citizenship, may actually have the opposite effect of fostering distrust in state government, a new study finds.
After all, there are no directly democratic institutions in the UK and trust in government is just as low here as it is in the US. Anyway, it is a moderately interesting piece of work, showing that US states with more referendums are less likely to express trust in their elected representatives than those in states where they do not happen.
