Mapping party support for EU referendums after Brexit: results from an expert survey

RESEARCH OBJECTIVE: This article aims at analysing the re­sults of the EU referendum in the UK and the implications and chal­lenges of Brexit for the European Union. THE RESEARCH PROBLEM AND METHODS: The basic problem of this publication is the analysis of special status of the UK in the EU, its significance as EU Member State and the immediate effects and future implications of Brexit. The research tools used in the arti­cle include literature studies, descriptive and comparative analysis. THE PROCESS OF ARGUMENTATION: The line of reasoning consists of four essential elements. At first, the UK’s membership in the EU is presented, and in particular its special status in the EU as well as the role of the UK’s economy in the EU. The next part focuses on the EU referendum in the UK – its results and effects for the British politics. The last two parts concentrate on the analysis of alternatives to membership in the EU and implications and challenges for the EU resulting from Brexit. RESEARCH RESULTS: Brexit is considered one of the most dan­gerous events in the global economy (some believe Brexit is more threatening than global financial crisis 2008+). Brexit has created a number of political, economic and social challenges for the EU, which have been intensified by other internal and external threats for the EU. CONCLUSIONS, INNOVATIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS: The situation in the UK and in the EU after Brexit is quite dynamic. It is hard to anticipate all the effects and implications of Brexit. The way the EU negotiates with the UK future British‑EU relations will determine its international position. The withdrawal negotiations of the UK will include operational and strategic, legal and financial issues. Brexit will considerably reduce demographic and eco­nomic potential of the EU. It will complicate financial aspects of EU integration. Brexit will necessitate reforms of the EU policies. Brexit will also limit political power of the EU.

This article considers party system effects and change in government-opposition dynamics in EU referendums. Relying on the analysis of party stances, party-voter alignments and campaign dynamics in 12 EU referendums in France, Ireland, Great-Britain and Spain, it shows that EU referendums tend to interfere with traditional party system dynamics in majoritarian democracies. By clearly manifesting a pro-European convergence between incumbent and mainstream opposition parties, they constitute a fertile ground to awake the ‘sleeping giant’ under certain conditions. EU referendums favor the temporary displacement of the partisan cleavage, create recurrent tensions for mainstream opposition parties and consistently reinforce the role played by protest parties. The recurrent intra-party factionalism or the limited mobilizations of pro-European opposition parties in referendum campaigns are thus not so linked with their ideologies or with endogenous factors, but are rather largely induced by their specific party system ‘situations’.

What determines how ‘European’ a party’s manifesto is? This article examines the salience of European issues in national parties’ Euromanifestos during the 1979–2004 period. I argue that domestic politics, including voter, party, and party system factors, influence the European content of a party’s Euromanifesto. Using data from the Euromanifestos Project for 14 member states, I find that the differential emphasis on European issues in the national party system, intra-party dissent on European integration, voter ambivalence on membership of the European Union, and party type all influence the salience of European issues in a party’s manifesto. These findings have important implications for understanding both how parties use manifestos to manipulate the political agenda and the dimensions of contestation in elections to the European Parliament.

On the 23rd June 2016, the UK public voted to Leave the EU in a close contest, with 51.89% advocating Leave and 48.11% optioning to Remain. In the aftermath of the vote, a rise in hate-crime was revealed signalling the fractious political climate at the time. Therefore, this paper reviews the discursive contribution of the UK online newsprint media during the EU referendum - with an emphasis on how migration-related arguments featured at different stages of the campaign. Political deliberations are supported by the media, who publish argumentative pieces in support of a certain outcome. Focusing on the comment pages of The Telegraph, The Daily Mail, The Guardian and The Mirror, this study provides an overview of how each campaign developed migration-arguments to support a Remain/Leave vote. This paper will demonstrate how the Discourse-Historical Approach to Critical Discourse Analysis can be used in conjunction with argumentation theory to examine how the representations of the circumstances surrounding an argument support a conclusion. Due to the influential capacity of the media, examination of what representational and argumentative strategies were relied upon will provide an insight into how the media contributed towards the public debate of the EU referendum and describe how migrants were objectified for political success.

This paper analyses strategic thinking around election campaign communication in a rapidly evolving media environment, characterized by the rise of digital communication channels and online social networks as new tools of political campaigning. Using an expert survey with campaign managers of 68 political parties within 12 European nations, representing both old and new EU member states, the study investigates the perceived importance of different types of communication platforms in meeting campaign objectives, especially with regard to differences between new and direct modes of campaigning in comparison to traditional campaign channels. The attributed significance to these various channels is then analysed against a range of variables on macro (country) level as well as meso (party) level. The results suggest that while some differences can be observed in regard to the perceptions of particular types of social media between individual strategists working for parties as well as between strategists working in new and old EU member states (e.g. Facebook is seen as more important in younger democracies), overall we can see a relatively high level of homogeneity in the perceived importance of campaign communication in the sample. The data point to the embedding of new communication platforms within election campaign strategies across most nations and parties; this indicates that the move towards ‘hypermedia' campaign style, integrating both old and new campaign tools and communication platforms, is now becoming a standard feature of professional campaigning strategy in Europe.

The paper investigates women's representation in the European Parliament delegations of the new member states by bringing together three distinct strands of scholarship: the second-order elections model, feminist theories of candidate recruitment and the literature on party positions on European integration. It tests three hypotheses explaining women's selection as candidates in European elections: the impact of electoral systems; the impact of political parties’ left–right placement and the impact of party positions on European integration. The key finding is that gendered patterns of candidate recruitment in the new member states are best explained as a function of political parties’ positions on European integration, with electoral systems and left–right placement having only a limited impact on the selection of women candidates.

Following the UK's EU referendum in June 2016, there has been considerable interest from scholars in understanding the characteristics that differentiate Leave supporters from Remain supporters. Since Leave supporters score higher on conscientiousness but lower on neuroticism and openness, and given their general proclivity toward conservatism, we hypothesized that preference for realistic art would predict support for Brexit. Data on a large nationally representative sample of the British population were obtained, and preference for realistic art was measured using a four-item binary choice test. Controlling for a range of personal characteristics, we found that respondents who preferred all four realistic paintings were 15-20 percentage points more likely to support Leave than those who preferred zero or one realistic paintings. This effect was comparable to the difference in support between those with a degree and those with no education, and was robust to controlling for the respondent's party identity.

This paper investigates first-level agenda-setting effects on Twitter during UK's EU referendum campaign. Using topic-modeling techniques, we investigate the dynamics of the interaction between users and the media content, and how the media outlets relate to each other. Results show that traditional media outlets dominated the debate, but alternative media played an important part. The media outlets that supported “Leave” stood closer to users' opinion who contributed to polarize the media's message, with pro-Leave side successfully framing some media's message in his own terms.

In this paper we review various methods of party positioning on issues and abstract political dimensions and describe the method that has been developed specifically for the Dutch voting advice application Kieskompas (Election Compass). Basically there are five methods for positioning political parties on political issues and on deeper-lying conflict dimensions: (a) expert surveys (b) voter surveys, (c) party elite surveys, (d) on the basis of roll-call behaviour (e) placements based on manifesto coding (either hand coded or by computer-based calibration). After reviewing the strengths and weaknesses of the various methods, we argue that combining expert placements with text-based calibration (using party manifestos) results in an improved methodology to position political parties on issues and bipolar political dimensions. This new methodology, that was developed for the Voting Advice Application Kieskompas, combines a text-based expert judgement, party-manifesto coding (including computer-based search techniques) and a self-placement by political parties. This process increases the validity and reliability of estimating party positions on political issues.

Factors Behind the UK EU Referendum 2016: A Multivariate and Path Analysis

Growing evidence points to the salience of European integration in the domestic political discourse of European member-states. Party-based euroscepticism is an intense point of contestation between different schools of thought. The current study defines euroscepticism as a socially and politically constructed strategy employed by peripheral political elites. The majority of the existing research focuses on inter- or intra-party dissent as a new dimension of existing social cleavages, therefore studying the popular attitudes towards Europe in the member-states. While this approach has its merits and accounts for some of the characteristics of opposition to European integration, it does not address adequately the oscillation of marginal party positions with regard to the European issue across time and electoral systems. This work focuses on the strategic nature of party-based euroscepticism. The theoretical model offered in this study facilitates understanding the processes of issue evolution and its establishment as a salient point of contestation. The current work addresses in particular the following questions: How to explain the volatile variability of party positions with regard to European integration across electoral systems, across party blocs, and across time? What are the conditions, under which an issue, such as the European integration, is politicized and how? And what are the consequences from the politicization of the European issue for the process of political contestation?

ABSTRACTThis research note presents EPAC 2017, a dataset resulting from the second round of an expert survey on ethnonationalism in party competition. EPAC provides cross-sectional data on the positions of (ethno-) national and mainstream parties on an ethnonational (also often referred to as ‘territorial’ or ‘centre-periphery’) dimension, as well as other important dimensions of political competition. The 2017 edition covers 222 political parties in 22 multinational European countries. The research note presents the main survey items and performs a series of validity and reliability tests on the data. Results show that EPAC 2017 provides valid and reliable measures of party positions on an ethnonational dimension. A short analysis of party system changes in Spain and Bosnia and Herzegovina illustrates the opportunities of combining the 2011 and 2017 editions. The combined dataset allows studying the mobilization of the centre-periphery cleavage in party competition across Eastern and Western Europe and over time.

ABSTRACTThe paper reports findings from a focus group study on representations of Europe, conducted in England in the run-up to the UK EU referendum. Four themes were identified in the analysis: ‘cultured Europe’; ‘little Europe/global Britain’; ‘Europe as a cultural threat’; and ‘Eastern vs. Western Europe’. Analysis of these themes showed that Europe was an ambivalent identity category that could encapsulate contrary ideas such as cosmopolitanism/isolationism and cultural enrichment/undermining. Europe’s relation to Britain was also ambivalent in the data. Britain could be positioned as superior to Europe, sometimes being seen as closer to the ‘European essence’ in the context of the EU’s eastward expansion, which was seen as diluting European culture. But, Britain could also be seen as backward compared to the idea of cosmopolitan continental Europe. These different lines of argument and their ideological underpinnings are explored in the discussion of the findings.

Despite a relationship between gender and support for populist causes in cross-national research, including in the 2016 US Presidential election, the role of gender has been missing in analysis of support for Brexit, most likely because women and men showed no average aggregate-level differences in voting Leave or Remain. This misses an important explanation for Britain’s vote to leave the European Union. We demonstrate how gender-based resentment motivated Leave votes in the EU referendum, through perceptions of discrimination against men, among men. Using novel survey measures, we demonstrate (i) the distinct nature of perceptions of discrimination towards men in comparison with discrimination towards women; (ii) the sociological sources of perceptions that men are discriminated against; and (iii) the role of these perceptions in Brexit support. Findings reveal that the Brexit referendum provided an opportunity to express broader social grievances than have, to date, been identified as relevant. The paper therefore offers a novel contribution to understanding the cultural backlash behind Britain’s vote to leave the EU, and by so doing, insight into the potential for gender-based backlash effects in elections where gender isn’t significantly primed, unlike the 2016 US presidential election where gender was a major political focus.

The Political Constitution Ten Years from Now Dodo or Phoenix? Implications of the Brexit Referendum