Referendum Debate Research Articles

An analysis of the anti-immigration discourse during the official 2016 Brexit referendum campaign

During the 2016 UK referendum on EU membership, most political and media actors highly debated the issue of the regulation of European immigration in the United Kingdom. The political salience of this issue led to attitudinal changes in public opinion regarding the European Union and its institutions. Brexiteers shaped the discourse on European immigration to influence how people chose to vote in the EU referendum. Their anti-immigration discourse had indeed a significant role in shaping beliefs among the public and, hence, in voters’ support for Brexit vote. This paper will assess the role of the Leavers’ rhetorical strategy, which consisted in portraying European immigrants as a threat to the British national community. Using official government speeches, parliamentary debates, press conferences, election manifestos, media interviews, social media and newspaper articles, the following paper will aim to highlight the discursive strategies of the prominent campaigners participating in the referendum debate. Analysing the hostile immigration stance through Critical Discourse Analysis, this article will examine how the Leavers’ anti-immigration discourse mobilised Welfare nationalistic values and beliefs to legitimise the referendum’s outcome.

Educational equality in the twenty-first century: white voter conflict over integration and community control

ABSTRACT Using an original survey experiment, this paper explores voter preference formation on competing dimensions of educational equality. In March 2012, residents of Evanston, IL voted on a ballot referendum that would levy taxes earmarked for building a new school in a historically Black neighborhood that has not had a neighborhood school since racial integration of the school district in the late 1960s. Competing visions of equality as either integration or community control were at the heart of the Evanston referendum debate; maintaining city-wide racial integration of all schools was pitted against providing equal access for all to a local school in their own neighborhood. This paper specifically focuses on how white voters, who often hold undue influence in education policy-making, form their preferences on an issue that has a significant racial impact. I find that priming and shifting context affect preference formation on both equality and this local policy question.

All About Feelings? Emotional Appeals as Drivers of User Engagement With Facebook Posts

Political campaigns routinely appeal to citizens’ emotions, and there is evidence that such appeals influence political behaviour. Social media, an important arena through which political actors communicate with voters, provide a rich source of data for investigating not only which communication strategies they use but also which of these engage followers. Building on political psychology and political communication literature, the present study investigates the relationship between appeals to specific emotions (fear, anger, enthusiasm, and pride) and the engagement that such posts generate on Facebook. We created an engagement index sensitive to the Facebook page follower count and employed multilevel modelling techniques. We conducted a manual content analysis of posts by British political parties and their leaders (<em>N</em> = 1,203) during the Brexit referendum debate on Facebook. We found that engagement with a post substantially increases when appeals to anger, enthusiasm, and pride are present. Conversely, there is no relationship between appeals to fear and engagement. Thus, the results indicate with observational data what we know about the effects of emotions from experimental research in political psychology. Emotions of the same valence (e.g., fear and anger) have a different relationship with user engagement and, by extension, political behaviour and participation online. This indicates that to fully understand the role of emotions in generating user engagement on Facebook, we must go beyond the positive and negative dichotomy and look at discrete emotions. Lastly, British political actors used Facebook communication to generate online political participation during the Brexit debate.

Making Astrology Look Respectable: On the Extraordinary Abuse of Economic Models in the EU Referendum Debate

In June 2016, I released an article entitled: “Measurement without Theory: On the extraordinary abuse of economic models in the EU Referendum debate” in advance of the referendum on 23 June 2016 on whether the UK should leave the European Union. That article heavily criticised two reports that had been released by the UK Treasury on the consequences of Brexit, calling them “dodgy dossiers” for “grossly exaggerating the impact of the economic consequences of Brexit and providing no analysis of the risks from remaining in the EU”. This article reproduces the 2016 article and also provides an update on the state of the UK economy five years after the publication of the reports. It confirms that the only purpose the two Treasury reports was to make astrology look respectable.

Down from the \u201cIvory Tower\u201d? Not so much\u2026Italian political scientists and the constitutional referendum campaign

Academics are often accused of being secluded in their “ivory towers”, focused on research and teaching but uninterested in, or unable to engage with, the public debate. If this is actually the case, under what conditions and at what particular moment is this likely to change? Following on three relevant dimensions—the visibility of political scientists, their partisanship and their impact in the public sphere—and combining press analysis with original survey data, this article has two main aims: first, to assess Italian political scientists’ (IPSs) social relevance in a period of huge political and institutional conflict such as the constitutional referendum held in December 2016; second, to explore the potential factors leading IPSs to be more or less present in the public debate. For the former, we focus on the public visibility of IPSs during the referendum campaign, as well as on the content of their public interventions, both concerning their neutral/partisan stance and their attitudes towards the constitutional reform. For the latter, we empirically test a few personal and institutional factors that are likely to influence individuals’ participation in the referendum debate.

Mainstreaming populism through the Twitter practices of politicians and the news media: A case study of the 2016 Brexit referendum debates

Over recent years, the Western world has witnessed the (re-)rise of populism, which was marginal compared to the (once-)dominant ideologies of globalisation and European integration. This article examines the role played by the Twitter practices of politicians and the news media in mainstreaming populism through a case study of the 2016 Brexit referendum debates. The communicative freedom of politicians and the extensive attention given to them by users enabled the presenting of populist arguments as a legitimate part of debates about the referendum. The news media paid overwhelming attention to politicians and focused on the issues of immigration and the economy in their tweets, creating the sphere of legitimate controversy where populist arguments appeared in parallel with those supporting globalisation and European integration. In this case, the Twitter practices of British politicians and the news media led to the extensive – but largely uncritical – presence and articulation of populist claims on Twitter. Their strong presence alongside pro-EU and pro-globalisation arguments gave these populist perspectives a central place in the debates on the referendum. The mainstreaming of populism through the Twitter practices of politicians and the news media is inextricably linked with, and thus needs to be understood within, the broader context of rising populism where the (once-)dominant ideologies of globalisation and European integration are in decline.

‘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.

A Corpus-assisted Critical Discourse Analysis of the Discursive Representation of Immigration in the EU Referendum Debate

This paper presents a critical account of the representation of immigration in the Brexit corpus—a collective corpus of 108,452,923 words compiled mostly from blogs, tweets, and daily news related to Brexit debate. The study follows the methodological synergy approach proposed by Baker et al. (2008), a heuristic methodological approach that combines methods of discourse analysis and corpus-assisted statistical tools including keyword, collocation, and concordance analysis. Drawing on this methodological synergy approach, the investigation yields significant findings contextualized within the socio-economic-political context of the European Union (EU) leave referendum to trace how the issue of immigration is represented in the discourses of the Remain and Leave campaigns. The frequency results show that immigration is one of the most salient topics in the Brexit corpus. Concordance analysis of the word immigrants and collocation investigation of the word immigration reveal opposing attitudes toward immigration in the EU referendum debate. The analysis uncovers negative attitudes toward the uncontrolled flow of immigrants from other EU countries and public concerns about immigrants' negative impacts on wages, education, and health services. Other findings reveal positive attitudes toward immigrants emphasizing their positive contributions to the UK economy. The study concludes with an argument of the significant association between the political and socio-economic ideologies of a particular society and the language communicated in its media.

“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.

The public accountability of social platforms: lessons from a study on bots and trolls in the Brexit campaign.

In this article, we review our study of 13 493 bot-like Twitter accounts that tweeted during the UK European Union membership referendum debate and disappeared from the platform after the ballot. We discuss the methodological challenges and lessons learned from a study that emerged in a period of increasing weaponization of social media and mounting concerns about information warfare. We address the challenges and shortcomings involved in bot detection, the extent to which disinformation campaigns on social media are effective, valid metrics for user exposure, activation and engagement in the context of disinformation campaigns, unsupervised and supervised posting protocols, along with infrastructure and ethical issues associated with social sciences research based on large-scale social media data. We argue for improving researchers' access to data associated with contentious issues and suggest that social media platforms should offer public application programming interfaces to allow researchers access to content generated on their networks. We conclude with reflections on the relevance of this research agenda to public policy.This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'The growing ubiquity of algorithms in society: implications, impacts and innovations'.

Correction to: What were the French telling us by voting down the ‘EU constitution’? A case for interpretive research on referendum debates

We regret that an error was introduced to the author’s affiliation. This has now been corrected. No other changes have been made.

A Primordial Attachment to the Nation? French and Irish Workers and Trade Unions in Past EU Referendum Debates.

We aim to contribute to a better understanding of the dynamics that are driving EU politicization and the rising Euroscepticism of workers and unions in the public sphere. One explanation frames the rise in Euroscepticism in cultural terms, emphasizing workers’ alleged primordial attachment to their nation. A second uses socioeconomic frames, linking growing Euroscepticism to the increasingly neo‐liberal direction of the EU. The weight of these competing frames in the referendum campaigns on the EU Constitution in France and the Lisbon Treaty and the Fiscal Treaty in Ireland cannot be measured easily, as the categorization of a phrase as socioeconomic or cultural is in itself subject to political classification struggles. We therefore presents the findings of an inductive lexical analysis of all Irish Times, all Le Monde and all worker‐ or union‐related articles published in almost all national media outlets during the mentioned referendum debates. This was made possible by the Alceste software package that allowed us to analyse very large corpuses of articles inductively. Our analysis reveals that socioeconomic terms dominated policy debates in both countries. The findings question existing EU politicization studies that were measuring the salience of different frame types by deductive analysis.

A Corpus-assisted Critical Discourse Analysis of the Discursive Representation of Immigration in the EU Referendum Debate

This paper presents a critical account of the representation of immigration in the Brexit corpus—a collective corpus of 108,452,923 words compiled mostly from blogs, tweets, and daily news related to Brexit debate. The study follows the methodological synergy approach proposed by Baker et al. (2008), a heuristic methodological approach that combines methods of discourse analysis and corpus-assisted statistical tools including keyword, collocation, and concordance analysis. Drawing on this methodological synergy approach, the investigation yields significant findings contextualized within the socio-economic-political context of the European Union (EU) leave referendum to trace how the issue of immigration is represented in the discourses of the Remain and Leave campaigns. The frequency results show that immigration is one of the most salient topics in the Brexit corpus. Concordance analysis of the word immigrants and collocation investigation of the word immigration reveal opposing attitudes toward immigration in the EU referendum debate. The analysis uncovers negative attitudes toward the uncontrolled flow of immigrants from other EU countries and public concerns about immigrants' negative impacts on wages, education, and health services. Other findings reveal positive attitudes toward immigrants emphasizing their positive contributions to the UK economy. The study concludes with an argument of the significant association between the political and socio-economic ideologies of a particular society and the language communicated in its media.

Batable ground

ABSTRACTThe poems that follow were written during and after a series of walks around the border town of Berwick-Upon-Tweed which has an architectural heritage marked by tension between England and Scotland. There is a medieval castle which changed hands fifteen times before falling into dis-use, Elizabethan Ramparts encircle the town and the Old Bridge was commissioned by James VI of Scotland whilst on the way to be crowned James I of England. These heritage features took on new significance during the Scottish Independence Referendum debate as submerged histories returned to the surface; I was in Berwick on the day voting took place, it was a quiet and misty day, the town seemed to be holding its breath. The poems are open form, composed by grid and field, making use of found texts and historical documents. They explore the entangled history of England and Scotland for those who dwell in the border.

United Kingdom

United Kingdom

Agenda control in EU referendum campaigns: The power of the anti‐EU side

AbstractEuropean Union (EU) referendums provide unique opportunities to study voters’ attitudes toward a distant level of governance. Scholars have long tried to understand whether EU referendum results reflect domestic (dis‐)satisfaction with the incumbent governments or actual attitudes toward the Union. Finding evidence supporting both domestic and European factors, the recent focus has thus turned to referendum campaigns. Recent studies emphasise the importance of the information provided to voters during these campaigns in order to analyse how domestic or European issues become salient in the minds of voters. These studies nonetheless overlook the asymmetrical political advantage in such campaigns. The broader literature on referendums and public opinion suggest that in a referendum, the ‘No’ side typically has the advantage since it can boost the public's fears by linking the proposal to unpopular issues. This article explores whether this dynamic applies to EU treaty ratification referendums. Does the anti‐EU treaty campaign have more advantage than the pro‐EU treaty campaign in these referendums? Campaign strategies in 11 EU treaty ratification referendums are analysed, providing a clear juxtaposition between pro‐treaty (‘Yes’) and anti‐treaty (‘No’) campaigns. Based on 140 interviews with campaigners in 11 referendums, a series of indicators on political setting and campaign characteristics, as well as an in‐depth case study of the 2012 Irish Fiscal Compact referendum, it is found that the anti‐treaty side indeed holds the advantage if it engages the debate. Nonetheless, the findings also show that this advantage is not unconditional. The underlying mechanism rests on the multidimensionality of the issue. The extent to which the referendum debate includes a large variety of ‘No’ campaign arguments correlates strongly with the campaigners’ perceived advantage/disadvantage, and the referendum results. When the ‘No’ side's arguments are limited (either through a single‐issue treaty or guarantees from the EU), this provides the ‘Yes’ side with a ‘cleaner’ agenda with which to work. Importantly, the detailed data demonstrate that the availability of arguments is important for the ‘Yes’ side as well. They tend to have the most advantage when they can tap into the economic costs of an anti‐EU vote. This analysis has implications for other kinds of EU referendums such as Brexit, non‐EU referendums such as independence referendums, and the future of European integration.

UK Environmental Law Post Brexit

While much of the post referendum Brexit discussion has focused on economic and constitutional issues, the future of environmental law and policies has received much less attention. Environmental protection barely featured as a campaign issue on either side of the referendum debate, and it is notably overlooked in the Brexit White Paper. Yet UK environmental law is deeply rooted in EU law and policies, and departure from the EU may herald significant changes within national law. Environmental law covers a broad range of public policies including biodiversity protection, air and water quality control, climate change and waste management, and deeply impacts other key domestic policies such as agriculture, transport, industrial and energy policy. Moreover, uncertainty in environmental regulation significantly jeopardises its chance of effectiveness. Therefore, careful reflection on the impact of Brexit on environmental law is essential. This article investigates what a gradual repatriation of EU law might mean, for specific areas (climate, ETS, biodiversity, air and water), for public authorities but also for civil society. The authors of this article envisage how cooperation between the UK and the EU could actually proceed in the future, on environmental law issues. Because there is actually no escape, or rather “an inescapable physical reality”: environmental problems will continue to require concerted action.

Discourse, performativity and the Irish marriage equality referendum debate

This article seeks to explore key aspects of Habermas’s critical social theory through the prism of Ireland’s 2015 Same-Sex Marriage Equality Referendum. Beginning with an exploration of the Kantian and Hegelian basis of Habermas’s theory of modernity, this article traces how Ireland rejected in this instance the inherited tradition and practices of its past when it voted to strike down a constitutional clause prohibiting marriage between same-sex couples. Also discussed are the historical obstacles to this self-generated normativity and the role of performativity in the lead-up to the plebiscite, a topic that leads inevitably to an exploration of the scholarly synergies between Habermas’s thesis and the works of Judith Butler.

Racial violence and the Brexit state

Research by the Institute of Race Relations into over one hundred incidents of racial violence reported in the mass media in the month after the EU referendum indicates that the ‘spike’ in such attacks has to be understood in terms of the racist climate created not just during the clearly nativist referendum debate, but also in the divisive policies and programmes of successive governments preceding it. The politicians and police chiefs, who have recently condemned the violence, analyse it in terms of already given media frameworks about ‘hate crime’: bigoted individuals are to blame; this is a law-and-order issue not a socially based problem – thus avoiding any responsibility for the creation of state racism. The research also reveals the central role of the police, at the expense of community groups’ or victims’ voices, when the media decides an attack is newsworthy.

Northern Ireland: Is Brexit a Threat to the Peace Process and the Soft Irish Border?

In Northern Ireland, the EU Referendum debate focused on two specific issues related to the political stability of the province and the Irish border, particularly as far as the Remainers were concerned. On the one hand, it was feared that leaving the EU would threaten the peace process since it would undermine the devolution settlement, which had been signed in April 1998 (The Good Friday Agreement). On the other hand, the issue of the Irish border raised quite a bit of uncertainty in the case of Brexit. Several politicians, like Prime Minister David Cameron, insisted that border checks should be implemented since Northern Ireland, which was the only nation of the UK to have a land border with another EU member, would become a non-EU country while the Republic of Ireland would remain part of it. Would Brexit really threaten Northern Ireland’s stability? In order to answer this question and assess the role played by EU membership in this debate, this paper will first focus on the specificities of the political and constitutional context of Northern Ireland before analysing the attitude of the population and the traditional policy of the main political parties towards the EU. The concerns raised by the issues of the peace process and the Irish border during the EU referendum debate will then be examined. Finally, this article will try to assess whether these fears were justified.