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The battle between direct democracy and representative government isn’t new, and it hasn’t always been the domain of just Republicans.

“This is very much connected to the rise of authoritarianism that we’ve seen across the country,” said Chris Melody Fields Figueredo, executive director of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, a nonprofit that tracks and supports ballot measures across the 26 states and the District of Columbia that allow some form of direct democracy.

Direct democracy in the United States took root during the Progressive Era of the late 1800s and early 1900s, especially in the West and Midwest, where newer states had less entrenched political structures and were more open to reform.

While efforts to override or undermine voter-approved initiatives are now almost exclusively driven by Republicans, Democratic-controlled legislatures have also tried to rein in direct democracy when it clashed with their priorities.

But most of the states that allow citizen-led ballot initiatives are Republican-controlled, which means the fight over direct democracy is often playing out in red states.