Referendum Campaign Research Articles

‘Crisis’ as a discursive strategy in Brexit referendum campaigns

ABSTRACTThe EU referendum was arguably the greatest political event in British politics since 1945 and the campaign was marked by divisive rhetoric. This paper investigates how Britain’s membership of Europe was narrated as a crisis by both sides of the discussion. I claim that this was a conscious discursive strategy by campaign actors for two reasons. Firstly, by constructing an event as a crisis implies that immediate measures need to be taken (by voters) to correct the situation. Secondly, this discursive strategy allowed actors from Leave and Remain campaigns to suspend partisan political divisions which would normally compromise co-operation. The chosen site of analysis is the televised EU referendum debate, entitled ‘The Great Debate’, which was broadcast two days before the referendum of June 23rd 2016.

Conventional Wisdom? Analyzing Public Support for a State Constitutional Convention Referendum

Although fourteen American states periodically hold automatic referendums on whether to hold a state constitutional convention, no state has approved a constitutional convention referendum since 1984. This study explores the puzzle of why voters would oppose an opportunity to broadly reform state government and the factors that underlie these attitudes. Analyses of two statewide surveys of registered voters in New York during the 2017 Constitutional Convention Referendum campaign reveal that campaign framing, elite cues, and instrumental concerns have led voters to take risk-averse positions in order to minimize potential losses that could result from a constitutional convention.

It’s the EU immigrants stupid! UKIP’s core-issue and populist rhetoric on the road to Brexit

The 2016 vote to leave the European Union was one of the biggest developments in recent United Kingdom political history. Only one political party was wholly united for Brexit – the United Kingdom Independence Party. This research finds that in the years leading up to Brexit, the United Kingdom Independence Party presented itself as a rigid core-issue complete-populist party. Content analysis shows how pervasive the European Union was in much of the party output and in the contemporaneous newspaper coverage of the party. The party also utilizes complete-populist rhetoric, with ‘othering’ populism as the most prevalent form. The consistent concentration on the European Union collocated with populist messaging, in both news releases and select newspaper coverage, may have helped afford the United Kingdom Independence Party issue-eliteness in the referendum campaign. But this same work may have also ultimately contributed to make them irrelevant by 2017, and possibly moribund by 2018.

Making sense of the social policy impacts of Brexit

ABSTRACTWhen Denmark, the Republic of Ireland and the UK joined the European Communities in 1973, their governments were required to transpose into domestic law all the treaty commitments previously negotiated by the six founding member states. A chapter on social policy in the 1957 Treaty, conceptualised as a necessary component of economic integration, was designed to prevent distortion of the rules of competition and ensure a high standard of social protection for workers. Although successive UK governments strongly supported the concept of a single European market, they resisted the notion of a European ‘social superstate’ or ‘social union’. They opposed the extension of qualified majority voting to social security and favoured softer forms of social legislation to preserve national sovereignty over social protection systems. This article attempts to make sense, firstly, of the role played by the social dimension during the UK’s membership of the European Union, the referendum campaign and Brexit negotiations; and, secondly, of the direct and indirect implications of Brexit for the future development of social and employment policy in both the EU and the UK. The authors consider the implications for the EU’s social agenda, and for employment rights, public service provision and living standards in the UK.

Brexitology: delving into the books on Brexit

Britain’s vote to leave the EU, also known as Brexit, has produced a wealth of books, which should come as no surprise given the unprecedented challenges and debates it has led to in the UK, the rest of Europe and around the world. This review looks at the full range of books published in the run-up to and after the referendum. It offers a way of breaking down the literature into seven manageable topics: how to study Brexit; the history of UK–EU relations; the referendum campaign; explaining the result, Britain’s Brexit; Europe’s Brexit; and Global Brexit. The review identifies some common themes in the books so far published and looks at what the future holds for this topic.

Community Standards: A Suggestion for New Scholarship

Community Standards:A Suggestion for New Scholarship Jonathan Morse (bio) Until recently, there seemed to be no need to say that a knowledge of Irish Catholic idiom is fundamental to reading the language of James Joyce. It was obvious. The educational norms governing the growth of Stephen Dedalus's mind are those of the Church and its Ireland, but so too are the norms of respectability in "The Boarding House," where going to Mass matters in the same indexical way as keeping the lace curtains white.1 From the moment the first notation was scribbled in a margin the night before class sometime in the twentieth century, teachers have always taught Catholic meanings when they called attention to words like "High Toast" and "inefficacious" in "The Sisters" (D 12) or "Epps's massproduct, the creature cocoa" in "Ithaca."2 Such annotations were not just supplements to the pedagogy [End Page 405] but incidents in the continuing history of Joyce's native culture. But the value system underlying that culture commands a different kind of assent now than it did in Joyce's time. When words of moral reproof were spoken about Ireland on 26 May 2018, it probably means something for the teaching of Joyce that they were not uttered in church. They came instead from a different institution, the New York Times, and began with this title: "Ireland Votes to End Abortion Ban in Rebuke to Catholic Conservatism."3 It was as if Catholic Ireland could no longer explain itself to itself in its inherited language and was in need of another. The article in the Times explains: The vote [which was decided by an unexpectedly huge margin] followed months of soul-searching in a country where the legacy of the Catholic Church remains powerful. It was the latest, and harshest, in a string of rejections of the church's authority in recent years. The church lost much of its credibility in the wake of scandals involving pedophile priests and thousands of unwed mothers who were placed into servitude in so-called Magdalene laundries or mental asylums as recently as the mid-1990s. The church was, in fact, largely absent from the referendum campaign. Anti-abortion campaigners actively discouraged its participation, preferring to emphasize moral values and human rights rather than religion, possibly to avoid being tarnished by the church-related scandals. That silencing of religion in the pulpit has left a diminution of echoes in the nave. The church-related words that once filled the air of Joyce's Ireland are heard less distinctly now. The article continues: "The church's influence in referendums has been eclipsed over the past decade. In 1983, when the Eighth Amendment [forbidding abortion] was voted in, 80 percent to 90 percent of Irish citizens attended weekly Masses. … Today, that figure is down to 20 percent to 30 percent." Simple mathematical logic teaches us that the Irish culture that gave Joyce to the world is changing, and the pedagogy of Joyce will be changing with it in its cultural matrix. At the time Joyce was writing his lexicography of "Grace," for instance, the men at Mr. Kernan's bedside could voice their collective Catholic assent in unison because they thought in unison. In their Dublin, a non-Catholic idea was almost a contradiction in terms. But (says the math) there is no consensus in the vocabulary now. When Mr. M'Coy says, "[T]hat's the thorax" (D 159), he means, "That's the pharynx," but everybody in the room has a sympathetic understanding of his mistake, whether or not they know it is a mistake, because everybody has been more or less in Mr. M'Coy's situation: living hand to mouth culturally as well as financially, filching words spelled [End Page 406] with an X from the coroner just as he filches his friends' suitcases. Listening through the bedroom door, readers of Joyce have always, until current times, been able to find an invisibly ironic position from which to eavesdrop because only they possessed such cultural collateral as a definition of "thorax." Now, though, Mr. M'Coy's descendants in a decolonized Ireland have won a knowledge of words like thorax...

The use of the political categories of Brexiter and Remainer in online comments about the EU referendum

AbstractIn June 2016, the United Kingdom held a referendum on EU membership; 52% of those who voted, voted to leave, and 48% voted to remain. During the referendum campaign, two identities emerged: “Brexiter” and “Remainer,” which remained salient post‐referendum. This study explores how the categories of Brexiter and Remainer were deployed by posters online. Data comprise comment threads collected from four online newspapers both during the campaign and after the vote, which focus on the Brexit campaign promise: “We send £350m a week to the EU. Let's fund our NHS instead.” We draw on membership categorization analysis and discursive psychology to analyse when categories were made salient and what responses to the invocation of categories were. Analysis revealed that posters explicitly categorize the out‐group and in doing so implicitly define their group. Posters resisted other political identities when attributed to them in relation to the referendum. The analysis shows how Brexiter and Remainer are new, albeit contested, political categories and identities in their own right, with other political identities resisted when used. The paper highlights implications for the political system in the United Kingdom and for social divisions within U.K. society.

This Account Doesn’t Exist: Tweet Decay and the Politics of Deletion in the Brexit Debate

Literature on influence operations has identified metrics that are indicative of social media manipulation, but few studies have explored the lifecycle of low-quality information. We contribute to this literature by reconstructing nearly 3M messages posted by 1M users in the last days of the Brexit referendum campaign. While previous studies have found that on average only 4% of tweets disappear, we found that 33% of the tweets leading up to the referendum vote are no longer available. Only about half of the most active accounts that tweeted the referendum continue to operate publicly and 20% of all accounts are no longer active. We tested whether partisan content was more likely to disappear and found more messages from the Leave campaign that disappeared than the entire universe of tweets affiliated with the Remain campaign. We compare these results with a set of 45 hashtags posted in the same period and find that political campaigns present much higher ratios of user and tweet decay. These results are validated by inspecting 2M Brexit-related tweets posted over a period of nearly 4 years. The article concludes with an overview of these findings and recommendations for future research.

Leave or remain? European identification, legitimacy of European integration, and political attitudes towards the EU

AbstractIn this paper, we look at the relationship between European identification and political support for (or opposition to) EU membership. First, we argue that conceptualizing political attitudes towards the EU as a direct product of European identification (a) neglects the distinction between the social reality of Europe and the political reality of the EU and (b) leads to psychological reductionism. We propose that the relationship should instead be conceptualized as mediated by legitimacy perceptions and as moderated by social‐level variables. Second, we look at three spheres of European integration and propose that their perceived legitimacy is appraised through the following principles: (a) normative solidarity for wealth sharing, (b) political authority for sharing political decisions, and (c) collective self‐realization for the sharing of practices. We illustrate the key mediating role of those principles by drawing on data from a survey ran across five European countries. Third, we argue that these meditational relationships are in turn moderated by social, political, and ideological realities and illustrate this point by looking at the case of United Kingdom in the context of the EU membership referendum. We point to an ideological assumption in the U.K. political landscape about the illegitimacy of EU supranational decision making and argue that this contributed to shape both the debate of the referendum campaign and its result.

Brexit and social rights

This article will consider the role of EU social rights in the the referendum campaign, what will become of social rights in the post Brexit world in the light of the EU (Withdrawal) Bill and the commitment to no-regression of social rights and what the EU might require in the event of a future trade deal. It will argue that while the future may look somewhat bleak for the maintenance of EU social rights, the imminent catastrophe that some fear will not happen. Instead there is a risk of stagnation of existing employment rights and a gradual erosion of the protection employees currently enjoy, especially if there is no robust requirement on the UK to continue to respect EU employment law rules.

The geographic evolution of political cleavages in Switzerland: A network approach to assessing levels and dynamics of polarization between local populations.

Scholarly studies and common accounts of national politics enjoy pointing out the resilience of ideological divides among populations. Building on the image of political cleavages and geographic polarization, the regionalization of politics has become a truism across Northern democracies. Left unquestioned, this geography plays a central role in shaping electoral and referendum campaigns. In Europe and North America, observers identify recurring patterns dividing local populations during national votes. While much research describes those patterns in relation to ethnicity, religious affiliation, historic legacy and party affiliation, current approaches in political research lack the capacity to measure their evolution over time or other vote subsets. This article introduces “Dyadic Agreement Modeling” (DyAM), a transdisciplinary method to assess the evolution of geographic cleavages in vote outcomes by implementing a metric of agreement/disagreement through Network Analysis. Unlike existing approaches, DyAM offers a stable measure for political agreement and disagreement—accounting for chance, statistically robust and remaining structurally independent from the number of entries and missing data. The method opens up to a range of statistical, structural and visual tools specific to Network Analysis and its usage across disciplines. In order to illustrate DyAM, I use more than 680,000 municipal outcomes from Swiss federal popular votes and assess the evolution of political cleavages across local populations since 1981. Results suggest that political congruence between Swiss local populations increased in the last forty years, while regional political factions and linguistic alignments have lost their salience to new divides. I discuss how choices about input parameters and data subsets nuance findings, and consider confounding factors that may influence conclusions over the dynamic equilibrium of national politics and the strengthening effect of globalization on democratic institutions.

Brexit and UK Environmental Policy and Politics

In 2016 the United Kingdom (UK) voted in a referendum to leave the European Union (EU). Whilst the environment did not feature significantly in the referendum campaign it has emerged as a major focus for the UK Government as it prepares for Brexit. Since the UK joined the EU in 1973, its approach to environmental policy-making has been profoundly shaped by processes of Europeanisation. Consequently, disentangling the UK from the environmental acquis communautaire will be a huge undertaking. Whilst the Government has committed to the pursuit of a ‘Green Brexit’ there are on-going concerns that Brexit will lead to weaker environmental ambition and governance. It may also produce policy divergence across the UK as the environmental sector is devolved and has become a site of constitutional conflict over the powers of the devolved nations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. A once stable policy area characterised by a broad cross-party and cross-national consensus therefore is, post-Brexit, increasingly likely to become a focus for constitutional and party political conflict and competition.

“The facts don’t work”: The EU referendum campaign and the journalistic construction of ‘Post-truth politics’

Arron Banks, the entrepreneur and largest donor to the Brexit campaign for the UK to leave the EU, has acknowledged in a newspaper interview that the successful campaign was predicated on generating an emotional response because ‘facts don’t work’ (Booth et al., 2016). The assertions made by the campaign – such as the £350M per week cost of EU membership which could instead be spent on the National Health Service – have been identified by commentators such as NYU professor of journalism Jay Rosen as ‘post-factual’ (Rosen, 2016). ‘Post-truth politics’ has been characterised as being recently imported to the UK from the United States (where it was found most recently in the campaigning of Donald Trump), and is understood as being in opposition both to Habermasian conceptions of the public sphere and to journalistic notions of objectivity. However, it can be challenged on the basis that political communications, in the form of spin, propaganda, rhetoric and public relations has always included such techniques (Negrine, 2008: 13). In this view, ‘post-truth politics’ is less a distortion of ‘true’ political activity, and more a discursive construction in the debates around the legitimacy and limits of political speech. In this context, this paper will seek to understand how British media have constructed the notions of truth, fact and the ‘post-factual’ during the referendum campaign, by analysing a number of key contested issues in the referendum debates, with a particular focus on the ‘fact-check’ websites and blogs which emerged in order to address what media channels presented as a distorted and unenlightening political process.

And yet it matters: referendum campaigns and vote decision in Eastern Europe

ABSTRACTReferendums campaigns are important and earlier research closely analysed their general functioning, effects on turnout, and the importance of media and information for voting behaviour. However, the role of referendum campaigns as such (with all its components) in shaping voting behaviour was widely neglected. This article seeks to partially fill this gap in the literature and argues that referendum campaign is an important predictor of the voting decision as long as people perceive it as informative and follow it. We investigate this effect in the context of three referendums organized in 2015–2016 in Bulgaria, Poland and Slovakia. The results indicate that these two variables explain the decision of citizens to support referendums across different settings. Their effects are consistent and significantly stronger than alternative explanations employed in the literature such as the limited effect of campaigns, second-order elections, partisan cues or amount of information received.

Gender, ownership and engagement during the European Union referendum: gendered frames and the reproduction of binaries

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’.

Perfil de la migración interna en Costa Rica pre y post aprobación Tratado de Libre Comercio entre Estados Unidos, Centroamérica y República Dominicana

Este artículo se enfoca en el análisis de los datos censales de las rondas de 2000 y 2011 para la caracterización del perfil de la migración interna antes y después de la aprobación en Costa Rica del TLC. Los resultados muestran que tanto en flujos migratorios, como en las etapas migratorias no se encontraron diferencias significativas en los resultados obtenidos. Históricamente en el estudio de las migraciones, el empleo es uno de los principales motivos para la movilidad poblacional; asimismo, fue uno de los argumentos más relevantes en la negociación del TLC, al igual que durante la campaña del referéndum, con lo que el postulado trabajo para todos los costarricenses parece quedar como una promesa de campaña que aún no se materializa.

Between Neoliberalism and Nationalist Populism: What Role for the ‘European Social Model’ and Social Quality in Post-Brexit Europe?

This article investigates the idea of ‘the social’ in Europe after the UK's EU Referendum vote, with reference to the ‘European social model’. It is argued that the key drivers of the vote outcome did not feature in the referendum campaign but are features of longer running and deeper fractures in both British and wider European society. Especially, the lack of response to societal problems, the downplaying of individual participation, and a crisis in democracy created by an increasingly neoliberal direction within an EU concerned with austerity and social control, contrary to the values of the ‘European social model’ (Walker, 2005). In the absence of action for better ‘social quality’, this overall neoliberal direction has also weakened the progressive and integrative potential of social policy. The result is the regressive nationalist populist backlash against neoliberal technocracy. Instead, we argue that answers to contemporary European challenges must focus on improving social quality and democracy.

“Where are we going to go now?” European Union migrants' experiences of hostility, anxiety, and (non‐)belonging during Brexit

AbstractThis paper examines the impact of the 2016 European Union (EU) referendum and its aftermath from the perspective of European migrants living in Wales. Drawing on interviews conducted with EU nationals in 2016 and 2017, the article highlights various examples of hostility and violence encountered by these migrants during and after the referendum campaign, demonstrating the longstanding nature of hostile experiences. It further outlines the uncertainty and insecurity experienced during this period, noting how Brexit affected not only EU migrants' rights and entitlements but also their settlement and sense of identity and belonging. The analysis sheds light on various negative emotions and reactions triggered by the referendum, illustrating the diversity of migrants' experiences. Highlighting the multiple and complex ways in which the referendum affected the migrants, the article argues that Brexit should be understood as an ongoing process of “othering” and unsettling.

United Kingdom’s Leaving Referendum From the European Union: Brexit

United Kingdom which has an ongoing relationship with the European Union since 1973 has generallyhad problematic relations during the membership process. A country who does not play a part in theearly European integration process keeps wary eye to the process she joins lately. This turbulent anddetached relationship brings the membership process which mostly contains sharp discussions to anunexpected breakpoint. Brexit has been the most important milestone in the United Kingdom-theEuropean Union relations. Therefore, examining the process through Brexit, its reasons and resultswill help understand the issue better. Given this goal, therefore, this study aims to deal with the Brexitprocess in detail and contribute to the existing literature. Process beginning with the reform requestsby Conservative Party in relations with the European Union in 2013 resulted in a referendum with51.9% leaving decision on June 23, 2016. In the Brexit referendum which proceeds from the populistand unreal discourses, Conservative Party and United Kingdom Independence Party have been theactors managing the whole process. Even these two political parties conduct different campaigns onthe EU membership which they turn it into a domestic policy tool; they have eventually completedthe process. Thus, for the first time, a member state decided to enter leaving process in the EuropeanUnion’s history. In this framework, this study initially deals with the historical background of theUnited Kingdom-the European Union relations and causes of Brexit. Then, economic effects of Brexiton United Kingdom and roles of Conservative Party and United Kingdom Independence Party in thisprocess were mentioned. Lastly, leaving process was chronologically examined and the steps of leavingprocess and the progress were shown. The process which happens for the first time in the EU historyhas been shaped by the EU’s relevant institutions joint with the UK’s authorities. Similar to a candidatecountry’s membership process, the leaving negotiations have been going on between the EU and theUK. As a conclusion, it is indicated that Brexit has negative effects on politics and economy of UnitedKingdom. Economic-wise, the study shows that the UK economy has been affected negatively in theshort-run in addition the negative expectations in the long-run. Political-wise, on the other hand,Conservative Party and United Kingdom Independence Party that have taken place in every stage ofthe process have gone up in flames and led their leaders who conducted referendum campaigns toabandon politics. Consequently, after a referendum without an exact winner, it is also unclear whathappens after the Brexit process.

New Challenges in the Coverage of Politics for UK Broadcasters and Regulators in the “Post-Truth” Environment

The last two years have been times of turbulence for the BBC, and other broadcasters, in terms of their coverage of UK politics. Their reporting of the general elections of 2015 and 2017, of the 2016 European Union Referendum and the 2015 election of Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of the Labour Party have been much criticised (as has that of other mainstream media outlets). And despite the rise of social media, the BBC remains the most used and most trusted source of news in the UK and hence is a vital element in the UK public sphere. Consequently, these journalistic failures—when its political coverage failed to reflect what turned out to be the reality on the ground - are particularly problematic. This brings into focus the issue of “the truth” in election and referendum campaigns. The example quoted here—about the Labour Party and antisemitism—illustrates the difficulties in arriving at the “truth”, even in the less frenetic atmosphere between campaigns. It demonstrates how there can be many truths and this, in itself, raises urgent questions about the nature of political journalism which pose challenges for public broadcasting in Britain with implications that go much wider.