Policy, Office and Votes: Conservative MPs and the Brexit Referendum

Abstract

The division within the Parliamentary Conservative Party (PCP) over Britain’s membership of the EU has been one of the most significant intra-party divisions in European political history. The 2016 Brexit referendum campaign offered a unique opportunity to consider legislative motivations as almost every MP declared a preference and frontbench MPs were free to back either side. This article uses logistic regression analysis in order to consider MPs’ motivations in terms of Muller and Strom’s policy, office and votes trichotomy. It is argued that all three motivations affected MPs decision making on the EU referendum. However, vote-seeking motivations were less influential than either policy or office-seeking.