Abstract
AbstractThis article examines how the British public perceived UK Prime Minister David Cameron's plan to renegotiate his country's relationship with the EU. It asks whether attitudes towards renegotiation followed a similar pattern to attitudes towards Brexit. It asks: are preferences towards renegotiation and Brexit related, and did British citizens perceive them as conflicting or complementary? We modelled the similarities and differences between these two types of preferences, which allowed us to classify the attitudes into four patterns: unconditional europhiles, rejectionist eurosceptics, risk‐averse eurosceptics and power‐seeking eurosceptics. Using a large‐N cross‐sectional survey conducted in the UK in April 2015 (n = 3000), our findings suggest that similar utilitarian concerns underpinned both types of preferences; but education and partisan cues differentiated them. Our findings have implications for understanding the result of the UK referendum. They also highlight the complex considerations that drive citizens’ attitudes towards the EU and help us predict the scope of public acceptance of EU reform initiatives by other governments.
Highlights
In his January 2013 Bloomberg Speech, the UK Prime Minister David Cameron announced that if his party was re-elected to government following the 2015 general election he would renegotiate a new settlement for his country and subsequently hold an ‘in-out’ referendum on its European Union (EU) membership
The percentage of unconditional europhiles, that is, those who were against both renegotiation and Brexit, was very small at approximately 8.3 per cent
Our findings contribute to our understanding of attitudes towards the EU in the UK by revealing that there were stark divides related not just to support for Brexit (Clarke et al, 2017; Curtice, 2016; Hobolt, 2016) and Cameron’s renegotiation
Summary
In his January 2013 Bloomberg Speech, the UK Prime Minister David Cameron announced that if his party was re-elected to government following the 2015 general election he would renegotiate a new settlement for his country and subsequently hold an ‘in-out’ referendum on its European Union (EU) membership. This was the first time that a head of government of an EU Member State promised the public a renegotiation of their country’s constitutional relationship with the EU since the latter was formally founded in 1993. Did British citizens view ‘Brexit’ and ‘renegotiation’ as complementary or as different from each other? If they were different, what led citizens to support or oppose them? By asking these questions we provide a nuanced understanding of how the British electorate made sense of a complex political deal and the challenges Cameron faced in trying to convince a majority of citizens to vote against Brexit
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