Abstract
How do votes in direct democratic ballots translate into policy preferences about future outcomes and affect the perceived legitimacy of those outcomes? This article examines these questions in the context of sovereignty referendums: specifically, the 2016 referendum on British membership of the European Union (EU). While the referendum result gave the British government a mandate for Britain leaving the EU, it did not provide any firm guidance as to the kind of Brexit that voters would prefer and consider legitimate. To examine the perceived desirability and legitimacy of different Brexit outcomes, we conducted a nationally representative conjoint experiment measuring attitudes towards different possible negotiation outcomes. Our findings show that ‘Leave’ and ‘Remain’ voters were highly divided over what they wanted from Brexit on salient negotiation issues, but also that most voters did not regard any possible outcome as legitimate.
Highlights
Referendums are increasingly used as a means of deciding important constitutional matters (Matsusaka 2005; Tolbert and Smith 2006; Hobolt 2009; Mendez and Germann 2018)
This is a particular problem in sovereignty referendums, which account for nearly half of referendums around the world (Butler and Ranney 1994; Mendez and Germann 2018), as such referendums are often open-ended, offering no clear blueprint for the complex future relationship between two territorial units
Considering the popularity of referendums in modern democracies today, it is important to know how to interpret the preferences expressed in those referendums and whether policy decisions based on direct democracy are perceived as legitimate
Summary
Referendums are increasingly used as a means of deciding important constitutional matters (Matsusaka 2005; Tolbert and Smith 2006; Hobolt 2009; Mendez and Germann 2018). The simple binary nature of most referendum ballots means that complex policy problems are often reduced to stark either/or choices (Setälä 1999; Bowler and Donovan 2002; Rose 2019). This is a particular issue in sovereignty referendums, where a decision to reallocate powers between two territories may be followed by protracted negotiations about the future of the relationship. While there is a large literature on voting behavior in referendums, we know far less about how such vote choices map onto preferences for these future policy outcomes
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