Voting for Change: Calculation, Community, and Euro Referendums

Abstract

Referendum votes on adoption of the euro in Denmark (2000) and Sweden (2003) provide unprecedented natural experiments through which to study the political economy of money. Using exit polling data and multinomial logit statistical models that allow us to separate preferences for the euro from preferences for the European Union (EU), we test economic “calculation” and political “community” as determinants of individual-level preferences over adoption of the euro. We find that “calculation” operates most clearly where, as in Sweden, the choice of a fixed versus a floating exchange rate regime is at stake, while “community” exerts strong effects across the two cases.We would like to thank Krister Andersson, Jerry Cohen, Robert Fishman, Jennifer Fitzgerald, Jeff Frieden, Eric Helleiner, Jacques Hymans, Lars Jonung, Kate McNamara, Jennifer Wolak, and the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments, and Helga Sverrisdottir for outstanding research assistance. We are grateful to Jens Wagner of the Danish Data Archive and Torbjörn Berglund of the Swedish Social Science Dataservice for providing the data used in this note. Neither these individuals nor their respective agencies are responsible for the interpretations contained herein.