Abstract
The European Union referendum was supposed to be a significant moment for political engagement and ownership in the UK. This article looks at how the two official European Union referendum campaigns (Vote Leave and Remain) framed discussions about the UK’s membership of the European Union, as well as the impact of the campaign on women’s political activation. Using data from a survey questionnaire conducted two weeks after the European Union referendum (in July 2016), we analyse women’s sense of political efficacy and engagement with European politics. We project those findings on a frame analysis, where we assess the footprint of each campaign in terms of issue coverage and the salience of gender as a campaign issue. Our findings shed light on the way in which issue framing and confidence affect the quality of political engagement among ‘weak publics’.
Highlights
The 2016 European Union (EU) referendum was a critical juncture in UK and European politics, and not just in terms of the relationship between the UK and the EU or the rise of Euroscepticism across Europe
Gender scholars have been calling for the inclusion of a gender dimension to the debate about EU membership (Haastrup et al, 2016; Guerrina et al, 2018; Rubery and Fagan, 2018), and since the referendum, civil society organisations have been advocating for gender impact assessments and a commitment to women’s rights in the context of the ensuing complex negotiations (Fawcett Society, 2018)
Based on the discussion of the survey earlier, our analysis focused on key policy areas, issues of salience and high politics to draw attention to key silences in public discussions about the nature of the EU, the impact it has had on national policies and the future relationship between the UK and the EU
Summary
The 2016 European Union (EU) referendum was a critical juncture in UK and European politics, and not just in terms of the relationship between the UK and the EU or the rise of Euroscepticism across Europe. It only seeks to explain women’s attitudes, rather than unpack the complex set of hierarchies that inform, and influence, women’s political ownership and engagement The failure of both campaigns to address issues relating to social policy, and the under-representation of women’s voices in media coverage, are two of the most significant silences of the research industry that has emerged around Brexit. The marginalisation of women’s voices, they argue further, had the impact of othering women and limiting their presence in what they call a watershed moment for British and European politics This process has permeated into wider Brexit research, with gender-sensitive analyses remaining largely absent from the scholarly discussions seeking to understand how Britain voted in 2016 (Gidron and Hall, 2018). In addition to this literature, we disentangle the complex relationship between the nature of the 2016 referendum campaign, women’s political ownership and the reification of the high–low binary at the heart of contemporary European politics
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