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Expectations, Vote Choice, and Opinion Stability Since the 2016 Brexit Referendum
Abstract
Can the UK retain its access to the single market without having to accept the free movement of people? Many Leavers believed that this was a realistic scenario. This analysis shows that expectations about the conditions of a future Brexit deal were strong predictors of the vote choice in the Brexit referendum. Using panel data from the British Election Studies, we additionally investigate how expectations have changed since the Brexit negotiations started. Our findings show that Leavers have become disillusioned over the course of the negotiations. However, these adjustments in expectations have not translated into a shift of opinion in regard to the Brexit vote itself. The implication of this analysis is that the UK electorate is divided in two quite stable, opposing camps.
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In the past few years, the world has witnessed an unprecedented popular backlash against international institutions. Popular demands to not only slow down, but to reverse international integration have proliferated, and have resulted in referendum and election outcomes that have reverberated across the world. Examples range from the Swiss 2014 mass immigration initiative over the British 2016 Brexit referendum to the 2016 election of a US President seemingly determined to withdraw US support from various international treaties. The implications of these mass-based disintegration efforts reach far beyond the countries in which they originate. First, the disintegration process is shaped by how remaining member states respond to one member’s bid to unilaterally change or terminate the terms of an existing international agreement. Second, mass-based disintegration bids also pose considerable risks of political contagion by encouraging disintegrative tendencies in other countries. Yet despite their disruptive nature, very little research exists beyond individual case studies on the general drivers, dynamics and challenges these instances of mass-based disintegration pose for international cooperation. This paper therefore engages in a comparative inquiry into the mass politics of disintegration that pays particular attention to the strategic dilemmas these instances pose for the affected international institutions and their remaining member states. It argues that the remaining member states have incentives to intervene in domestic campaigns in which disintegration figures as a viable outcome, but that the difficulties of successful intervention are considerable. It also shows that after a vote in favor of disintegration, the remaining member states face an “accommodation dilemma” between preserving as many cooperation gains as possible and making exit costly in order to discourage other member states from following suit.
Previous analyses of the 2016 Brexit referendum used region-level data or small samples based on polling data. The former might be subject to ecological fallacy and the latter might suffer from small-sample bias. We use individual-level data on thousands of respondents in Understanding Society, the UK's largest household survey, which includes the EU referendum question. We find that voting Leave is associated with older age, white ethnicity, low educational attainment, infrequent use of smartphones and the internet, receiving benefits, adverse health and low life satisfaction. These results coincide with corresponding patterns at the aggregate level of voting areas. We therefore do not find evidence of ecological fallacy. In addition, we show that prediction accuracy is geographically heterogeneous across UK regions, with strongly pro-Leave and strongly pro-Remain areas easier to predict. We also show that among individuals with similar socio-economic characteristics, Labour supporters are more likely to support Remain while Conservative supporters are more likely to support Leave.
There are long-standing debates amongst scholars of European Union politics over the relative importance of member states and supranational institutions in determining what happens in the EU. This paper treats the case of ‘Brexit’ as a case study, considering the positions of the EU institutions, France, Germany and the V4, focusing particularly on dissociation issues, questions of migration, the customs union and trade, and the UK’s relationship to the single market during the first year of exit negotiations. It finds that while there are distinct national priorities, EU institutions have been able to synthesise these rather effectively into a common position which meets member states’ priorities as well as their own, confirming the claims of those who emphasise the ability of EU institutions to drive European integration and act on behalf of member states.
The decision of the Cameron government to renegotiate the terms of UK membership and to hold an in-out referendum has triggered a novel process in European integration: differentiated disintegration, the selective reduction of a member state's level and scope of integration. The article starts from an established postfunctionalist explanation of differentiated integration and claims that it also explains demand for disintegration. In this perspective, Brexit resulted from a mix of integration effects (immigration) challenging self-determination, the rise of a Eurosceptic party, and the availability of referendums. By contrast, the institutional and material bargaining power of states demanding disintegration is considerably lower than that of states demanding opt-outs in the context of integration negotiations. Consequently, demanders of disintegration moderate their demands and make concessions to the EU in the course of negotiations. The ongoing UK-EU disintegration negotiations confirm this expectation.
In this paper we employ an extension of the World Input-Output Database (WIOD) with regional detail for EU countries to study the degree to which EU regions and countries are exposed to negative trade-related consequences of Brexit. We develop an index of this exposure, which incorporates all effects due to geographically fragmented production processes within the UK, the EU and beyond. Our findings demonstrate that UK regions are far more exposed than regions in other countries. Only regions in the Republic of Ireland face exposure levels similar to some UK regions, while the next most affected regions are in Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium and France. This imbalance may influence the outcomes of the negotiations between the UK and the EU.
Britain’s vote to leave the European Union highlights the importance of White majority opposition to immigration. This article presents the results of a survey experiment examining whether priming an open form of ethno-nationalism based on immigrant assimilation reduces hostility to immigration and support for right-wing populism in Britain. Results show that drawing attention to the idea that assimilation leaves the ethnic majority unchanged significantly reduces hostility to immigration and support for Hard Brexit in the UK. Treatment effects are strongest among UK Independence Party, Brexit and White working-class voters. This is arguably the first example of an experimental treatment leading to more liberal immigration policy preferences.
The Leave majority recorded in England was decisive in determining the UK-wide referendum result. Brexit was made in England. We take this as a prompt to challenge the conventional Anglo-British mindset that animates most studies of ‘British politics’ and has shaped public attitudes research on the United Kingdom. We explore the persistence of distinctive Eurosceptic views in England and their relationship to English national identity prior to the referendum. We then model referendum vote choice using data from the Future of England Survey. Our analysis shows that immigration concerns played a major role in the Brexit referendum, alongside a general willingness to take risks, right-wing views, older age, and English national identity. Therefore, Brexit was not just made in England, but Englishness was also a significant driver of the choice for Leave.
Does evidence help politicians make informed decisions even if it is at odds with their prior beliefs? And does providing more evidence increase the likelihood that politicians will be enlightened by the information? Based on the literature on motivated political reasoning and the theory about affective tipping points, this article hypothesizes that politicians tend to reject evidence that contradicts their prior attitudes, but that increasing the amount of evidence will reduce the impact of prior attitudes and strengthen their ability to interpret the information correctly. These hypotheses are examined using randomized survey experiments with responses from 954 Danish politicians, and results from this sample are compared to responses from similar survey experiments with Danish citizens. The experimental findings strongly support the hypothesis that politicians are biased by prior attitudes when interpreting information. However, in contrast to expectations, the findings show that the impact of prior attitudes increases when more evidence is provided.
In this commentary, we embed the volume's contributions on public beliefs about science in a broader theoretical discussion of motivated political reasoning. The studies presented in the preceding section of the volume consistently find evidence for hyperskepticism toward scientific evidence among ideologues, no matter the domain or contextand this skepticism seems to be stronger among conservatives than liberals. Here, we show that these patterns can be understood as part of a general tendency among individuals to defend their prior attitudes and actively challenge attitudinally incongruent arguments, a tendency that appears to be evident among liberals and conservatives alike. We integrate the empirical results reported in this volume into a broader theoretical discussion of the John Q. Public model of information processing and motivated reasoning, which posits that both affective and cognitive reactions to events are triggered unconsciously. We find that the work in this volume is largely consistent with our theories of affect-driven motivated reasoning and biased attitude formation.
Support for independence from Spain has sharply increased in recent years in Catalonia. According to all available evidence, public opinion has shifted from an overwhelmingly pro-autonomy position to an increasingly pro-independence stance. How can we explain such widespread support for secession in a democratic context? Traditionally, national identity has been regarded as the main explanatory factor, but recent accounts tend to underline the effect of political elite’s agency as well as instrumental calculations regarding the economic consequences of secession. However, the identification of this last causal effect is subject to a fundamental challenge: the possibility that economic expectations are mere rationalizations of prior preferences. In order to overcome this identification problem, we combine the analysis of observational survey data with an original survey-embedded experiment that provides a robust test of the causal nature of economic expectations. Our results show how identity, as well as partisanship, are the main drivers of support for secession, but also that economic considerations play an independent role. Results show that economic motivations are more relevant for citizens with ambivalent identity positions and for those that have no party identification, or are partisans of parties with less clear-cut stances on the issue.
Referenda on important public policy questions have come to play a central role in policy making in many states. Referenda, or ballot propositions, have resulted in limits on taxation and limits on the number of terms of elected officials, and have dealt with bilingual education, campaign finances, and affirmative action, in states all over the country. Shaun Bowler and Todd Donovan present a searching and original examination of how voters make decisions in direct referenda. The authors ask if voters have some information about the issue easily at their disposal and if they make choices that seem sensible given their interests and the information they have. Looking at the way voters respond to different kinds of questions, the authors suggest that while direct democracy has its failings, the flaws do not necessarily lie with citizens being “duped,” nor with voters approving propositions they do not want or do not understand at some basic level. As cynicism about government has increased many have sought to take policy questions out of the hands of elected officials and put the questions directly before the voters for decision. And yet many are skeptical about the ability of voters to make intelligent decisions about complex policy issues. This important book demonstrates that voters are capable of responding thoughtfully to referenda questions. This book will appeal to students of contemporary American politics and electoral politics.
This multimethodological study focuses on risk-induced electoral mobilization in referendum campaigns. Positive news framing in a referendum campaign can generate a perception of risk among those voters opposing the proposal and stimulate electoral participation to prevent an undesired outcome that would alter a status quo situation. To test this claim, the authors analyze the effect of news framing on turnout in the context of the 2005 Dutch EU Constitution referendum campaign and combine a media content analysis of national newspapers and television news (n = 6,370) with panel survey data (n = 642) and an experiment (n = 687). Experimental findings show that individuals who are skeptical toward the EU and are subsequently exposed to positive news framing about the EU Constitution are mobilized to turn out and vote against it. The results of the content analysis show that during the Dutch referendum campaign, news media framed the EU Constitution in positive terms. Building these findings into a measure of news exposure in our panel survey, the authors find that higher exposure to referendum news had a mobilizing effect on those opposing the proposal. The experimental and panel data thus show corroborating evidence supporting the central hypothesis about how positive news can mobilize the skeptics to turn out and vote in a referendum.
This article summarizes and extends the main lines of theorizing on public opinion on European integration. We test theories of economic calculus and communal identity in a multi-level analysis of Eurobarometer data. Both economic calculus and communal identity are influential, but the latter is stronger than the former. We theorize how the political consequences of identity are contested and shaped - that is to say, politically cued - in national contexts. The more national elites are divided, the more citizens are cued to oppose European integration, and this effect is particularly pronounced among citizens who see themselves as exclusively national. A model that synthesizes economic, identity, and cue theory explains around one-quarter of variation at the individual level and the bulk of variation at the national and party levels.
Preferences over jurisdictional architecture are the product of three irreducible
logics: efficiency, distribution and identity. This article substantiates the
following claims: (a) European integration has become politicized in elections
and referendums; (b) as a result, the preferences of the general public and of
national political parties have become decisive for jurisdictional outcomes; (c)
identity is critical in shaping contestation on Europe.
In this article, we argue that progress in the study of collective action rests on an increasingly sophisticated application of the social identity approach. We develop the view, however, that the application of this theoretical perspective has been limited by theoretical and empirical difficulties in distinguishing between social categories and psychological groups. These problems have undermined the ability of researchers to correctly specify the collective identities that actually underpin many instances of collective action. As a partial solution to this problem we focus on collective identities based on shared opinion (opinion-based groups). We develop the proposition that much collective action reflects the crystallization or instantiation of opinion-based groups. We also outline an intervention aimed at stimulating commitment to collective action through group-based interaction involving opinion-based group members. We conclude by emphasizing that opinion-based groups tend to be most successful when they present themselves as being representative or aligned with dominant, positively valued social categories such as nations.
A well-functioning democracy requires a degree of mutual respect and a willingness to talk across political divides. Yet numerous studies have shown that many electorates are polarized along partisan lines, with animosity towards the partisan out-group. In this article, we further develop the idea of affective polarization, not by partisanship, but instead by identification with opinion-based groups. Examining social identities formed during Britain’s 2016 referendum on European Union membership, we use surveys and experiments to measure the intensity of partisan and Brexit-related affective polarization. The results show that Brexit identities are prevalent, felt to be personally important, and cut across traditional party lines. These identities generate affective polarization as intense as that of partisanship in terms of stereotyping, prejudice, and various evaluative biases, convincingly demonstrating that affective polarization can emerge from identities beyond partisanship.
The European Union (EU) is facing one of the rockiest periods in its existence. At no time in its history has it looked so economically fragile, so insecure about how to protect its borders, so divided over how to tackle the crisis of legitimacy facing its institutions, and so under assault by Eurosceptic parties. The unprecedented levels of integration in recent decades have led to increased public contestation, yet at the same the EU is more reliant on public support for its continued legitimacy than ever before. This book examines the role of public opinion in the European integration process. It develops a novel theory of public opinion that stresses the deep interconnectedness between people’s views about European and national politics. It suggests that public opinion cannot simply be characterized as either Eurosceptic or not, but rather that it consists of different types. This is important because these types coincide with fundamentally different views about the way the EU should be reformed and which policy priorities should be pursued. These types also have very different consequences for behaviour in elections and referendums. Euroscepticism is such a diverse phenomenon because the Eurozone crisis has exacerbated the structural imbalances within the EU. As the economic and political fates of member states have diverged, people’s experiences with and evaluations of the EU and national political systems have also grown further apart. The heterogeneity in public preferences that this book has uncovered makes a one-size-fits-all approach to addressing Euroscepticism unlikely to be successful.
When popular referendums fail to ratify new international agreements or succeed in reversing existing ones, it not only affects domestic voters but also creates negative spillovers for the other parties to such agreements. We explore how voters respond to this strategic environment. We use original survey data from a poll fielded just one day before the 2015 Greek bailout referendum—a referendum in which the stakes for other countries were particularly high—to investigate how expectations about the likely foreign response to a noncooperative referendum outcome influence voting behavior and to what extent foreign policymakers can influence those expectations. Our analysis of the Greek referendum shows that such expectations had a powerful effect on voting behavior: voters expecting that a noncooperative referendum outcome would force Greece to leave the eurozone were substantially more likely to vote cooperatively than those believing that it would result in renewed negotiations with the country's creditors. Leveraging the bank closure that took place right before the vote, we also show that costly signals by foreign actors made voters more pessimistic about the consequences of a noncooperative vote and substantially increased the share of cooperative votes.
We show that support for the Leave option in the Brexit referendum was systematically higher in regions hit harder by economic globalization. We focus on the shock of surging imports from China over the past three decades as a structural driver of divergence in economic performance across U.K. regions. An IV approach supports a causal interpretation of our finding. We claim that the effect is driven by the displacement determined by globalization in the absence of effective compensation of its losers. Neither overall stocks nor inflows of immigrants in a region are associated with higher support for the Leave option. A positive association only emerges when focusing on immigrants from EU accession countries. The analysis of individual data suggests that voters respond to the import shock in a sociotropic way, as individuals tend to react to the general economic situation of their region, regardless of their specific condition.
Partisanship often colors how citizens perceive real‐world conditions. For example, an oft‐documented finding is that citizens tend to view the state of the national economy more positively if their party holds office. These partisan perceptual gaps are usually taken as a result of citizens' own motivated reasoning to defend their party identity. However, little is known about the extent to which perceptual gaps are shaped by one of the most important forces in politics: partisan elites. With two studies focusing on perceptions of the economy—a quasi‐experimental panel study and a randomized experiment—we show how partisan perceptual differences are substantially affected by messages coming from party elites. These findings imply that partisan elites are more influential on, and more responsible for, partisan perceptual differences than previous studies have revealed.
On 23 June 2016, the British electorate voted to leave the European Union (EU). We analyse vote and turnout shares across 380 local authority areas in the United Kingdom. We find that exposure to the EU in terms of immigration and trade provides relatively little explanatory power for the referendum vote. Instead, we find that fundamental characteristics of the voting population were key drivers of the Vote Leave share, in particular their education profiles, their historical dependence on manufacturing employment as well as low income and high unemployment. At the much finer level of wards within cities, we find that areas with deprivation in terms of education, income and employment were more likely to vote Leave. Our results indicate that a higher turnout of younger voters, who were more likely to vote Remain, would not have overturned the referendum result. We also compare our UK results to voting patterns for the far-right leader Marine Le Pen in the 2017 French presidential election. We find similar factors driving the French vote. An out-of-sample prediction of the French vote using UK estimates performs reasonably well.
This article investigates forces that shaped the decisions voters made in the 23 June 2016 referendum on the UK's continued membership in the European Union. A multivariate model informed by previous research on voting in major "polity-shaping' referendums is employed assess factors affecting how voters cast their ballots in the EU referendum. Employing data gathered in a national panel survey conducted before and after the referendum, analyses document that economic- and immigration-focused benefit-cost evaluations strongly influenced voters' decisions. Risk assessments, emotional reactions to EU membership and leader image heuristics were other major proximate forces driving the choices voters made. National identities were influential as well, but operated further back in the set of forces affecting attitudes towards the EU. The June 23rd Brexit decision thus reflected a diverse mix of calculations, emotions and cues. Given the close division of the vote, it is plausible that a substantial change in any of these factors could have changed the referendum outcome.
If public opinion about foreign policy is such an elite-driven process, why does the public often disagree with what elites have to say? We argue here that elite cue-taking models in International Relations are both overly pessimistic and unnecessarily restrictive. Members of the public may lack information about the world around them, but they do not lack principles, and information need not only cascade from the top down. We present the results from five survey experiments where we show that cues from social peers are at least as strong as those from political elites. Our theory and results build on a growing number of findings that individuals are embedded in a social context that combines with their general orientations toward foreign policy in shaping responses toward the world around them. Thus, we suggest the public is perhaps better equipped for espousing judgments in foreign affairs than many of our top-down models claim.
The 2016 referendum marked a watershed moment in the history of the United Kingdom. The public vote to leave the EU –for a Brexit’- brought an end to the country’s membership of the European Union (EU) and set it on a fundamentally different course. Recent academic research on the vote for Brexit points to the importance of immigration as a key driver, although how immigration influenced the vote remains unclear. In this article, we draw on aggregate level data and individual-level survey data from the British Election Study (BES) to explore how immigration shaped public support for Brexit. Our findings suggest that, specifically, increases in the rate of immigration at the local level and sentiments regarding control over immigration were key predictors of the vote for Brexit, even after accounting for factors stressed by established theories of Eurosceptic voting. Our findings suggest that a large reservoir of support for leaving the EU, and perhaps anti-immigration populism more widely, will remain in Britain, so long as immigration remains a salient issue.
The result of the referendum in the United Kingdom in 2016 to leave the European Union sparked much interest on the socio-economic characteristics of ‘Brexiters’. In this article, we challenge the popularized view of the Leave voter as an outsider and find that individuals from an intermediate class, whose malaise is due to a declining financial position, represent an important segment of the Brexit vote. We use individual-level data from a post-Brexit survey based on the British Election Study. Our analysis tests three predictive models. First, although our analysis confirms the negative association between education and Leave vote, we find that voting Leave is associated more with intermediate levels of education than with low or absent education, in particular in the presence of a perceived declining economic position. Secondly, we find that Brexiters hold distinct psycho-social features of malaise due to declining economic conditions, rather than anxiety or anger. Thirdly, our exploratory model finds voting Leave associated with self-identification as middle class, rather than with working class. We also find that intermediate levels of income were not more likely to vote for remain than low income groups. Overall our analysis of the Brexit vote underlines the importance of considering the political behaviour of the declining middle.
On 23 June 2016, a majority of 52% of British voters decided in a referendum that the United Kingdom should leave the European Union. The decision sent shockwaves around Britain, Europe, and the world: the ‘Brexit’-vote presents the first instance that a country has voted to exit a major supranational institution, putting both the European integration project and the future of the United Kingdom in a globalized world into question. At the time of writing, four months after the referendum vote, the contours of Brexit remain unclear. Yet even within this short time frame, Brexit politics have been remarkable on both the domestic and the international level. In this paper, we first present a brief overview of IPE research in the open economy politics (OEP) tradition. We then discuss the insights OEP provides that help us to better understand the referendum vote and Brexit politics, but also emphasize that they present a number of puzzles for OEP-inspired researchers. Based on this analysis, the final section suggests avenues for advancing the OEP research program.
The mismatch between local voting and the local economic consequences of Brexit. Regional Studies. This paper reveals that in the 2016 UK referendum regarding whether to remain in or leave the European Union, the regions that voted strongly for leave tended also to be those same regions with greatest levels of dependency on European Union markets for their local economic development. This observation flies in the face of pro-leave narratives that posited that the major beneficiaries of European Union membership were the ‘metropolitan elites’ of London. Economic geography dominated the observed voting patterns, and geography will also certainly dominate the post-Brexit economic impacts, but not necessarily in a way that voters anticipated or wished for.
Right-wing populist parties in European democracies appeal to citizens’ feelings of uncertainty related to globalization by promoting tough immigration laws and curbing the power of the European Union. This article adds to our understanding of how individuals’ risk propensity relates to support for right-wing populist parties and their ideas in the context of globalization. In particular, by drawing on survey data from the United Kingdom we investigate how this personality trait relates to support for the United Kingdom Independence Party and the vote for a British exit from the European Union. The article explores the complex interplay between risk propensity and right-wing populist appeals by dissecting the direct, indirect and total effects of this trait.
Political misperceptions can distort public debate and undermine people's ability to form meaningful opinions. Why do people often hold these false or unsupported beliefs, and why is it sometimes so difficult to convince them otherwise? We argue that political misperceptions are typically rooted in directionally motivated reasoning, which limits the effectiveness of corrective information about controversial issues and political figures. We discuss factors known to affect the prevalence of directionally motivated reasoning and assess strategies for accurately measuring misperceptions in surveys. Finally, we address the normative implications of misperceptions for democracy and suggest important topics for future research.
The EU institutions must diagnose the crisis that Brexit and Trump have brought to the fore as an economic crisis that is malleable to policy, and they must forcibly sell that diagnosis to the member states if they want to halt the further disintegration of the EU. Doing so would give member states room to experiment with locally appropriate policies rather than simply accept "one size fits none" policy rules. Such a diagnosis would be nothing less than an explicit political intervention by a supposedly technocratic set of institutions. But technocracies work best in good times, and these are not good times.
A key requirement of democratic governance is that policy outcomes and the majority preference of the electorate are congruent. Many studies argue that the more direct democratic a system is, the more often voters get what they want, but the empirical evidence is mixed. This analysis explores the democratic effect of initiatives and referendums theoretically and empirically. The prediction of the formal model is that “bad” representation (i.e., a large preference deviation between the electorate and the political elite) is good for the democratic effect of direct democracy. An empirical investigation of original voter and elite survey data, analyzed with multilevel modeling and poststratification, supports this argument. Building on the literature, the findings of the analysis suggest that the extent to which direct democratic institutions are conducive for policy congruence—and may thus be advisable as democratic correctives to representative systems—depends on the political conflict structure.
The outcome of the British referendum on EU membership sent shockwaves through Europe. While Britain is an outlier when it comes to the strength of Euroscepticism, the anti-immigration and anti-establishment sentiments that produced the referendum outcome are gaining strength across Europe. Analysing campaign and survey data, this article shows that the divide between winners and losers of globalization was a key driver of the vote. Favouring British EU exit, or ‘Brexit’, was particularly common among less educated, poorer and older voters, and those who expressed concerns about immigration and multi-culturalism. While there is no evidence of a short-term contagion effect with similar membership referendums in other countries, the Brexit vote nonetheless poses a serious challenge to the political establishment across Europe.
Why did Britain vote for Brexit? What was the relative importance of factors such as education, age, immigration and ethnic diversity? And to what extent did the pattern of public support for Brexit across the country match the pattern of public support in earlier years for eurosceptic parties, notably the UK Independence Party (UKIP)? In this article we draw on aggregate-level data to conduct an initial exploration of the 2016 referendum vote. First, we find that turnout was generally higher in more pro-Leave areas. Second, we find that public support for Leave closely mapped past support for UKIP. And third, we find that support for Leave was more polarised along education lines than support for UKIP ever was. The implication of this finding is that support for euroscepticism has both widened and narrowed—it is now more widespread across Britain but it is also more socially distinctive.
This article shows that key to understanding the referendum outcome are factors such as a profoundly eurosceptic public, high levels of citizen uncertainty, divided mainstream political parties on the EU and lack of unity within the 'Leave' campaign. The Brexit referendum is more than just about domestic issues and government approval. Utilitarian concerns related to economic evaluations of EU integration coupled with support of or opposition to EU freedom of movement are very likely to influence vote choice. Those campaigns that focus on rational utilitarian arguments about the costs and benefits related to EU membership as a whole but also to EU freedom of movement are expected to swing voters.
A key characteristic of democratic politics is competition between groups, first of all political parties. Yet, the unavoidably partisan nature of political conflict has had too little influence on scholarship on political psychology. Despite more than 50 years of research on political parties and citizens, we continue to lack a systematic understanding of when and how political parties influence public opinion. We suggest that alternative approaches to political parties and public opinion can be best reconciled and examined through a richer theoretical perspective grounded in motivated reasoning theory. Clearly, parties shape citizens' opinions by mobilizing, influencing, and structuring choices among political alternatives. But the answer to when and how parties influence citizens' reasoning and political opinions depends on an interaction between citizens' motivations, effort, and information generated from the political environment (particularly through competition between parties). The contribution of motivated reasoning, as we describe it, is to provide a coherent theoretical framework for understanding partisan influence on citizens' political opinions. We review recent empirical work consistent with this framework. We also point out puzzles ripe for future research and discuss how partisan‐motivated reasoning provides a useful point of departure for such work.
Partisans often perceive real world conditions in a manner that credits their own party. Yet recent findings suggest that partisans are capable of setting their loyalties aside when confronted with clear evidence, for example, during an economic crisis. This study examines a different possibility. While partisans may acknowledge the same reality, they may find other ways of aligning undeniable realities with their party loyalties. Using monthly survey data collected before and after the unexpected collapse of the British national economy (2004-10), this study presents one key finding: As partisans came to agree that economic conditions had gotten much worse, they conversely polarized in whether they thought the government was responsible. While the most committed partisans were surprisingly apt in acknowledging the economic collapse, they were also the most eager to attribute responsibility selectively. For that substantial share of the electorate, partisan-motivated reasoning seems highly adaptive.
As a result of the initiative against mass immigration (MEI) Switzerland faces a dilemma between control of immigration and the continuation of bilateral agreements. This contribution raises two questions: First, have Swiss citizens' perceptions regarding the incompatibility between immigration control and bilateral agreements evolved since the vote on the MEI in February 2014? Second, what would Swiss citizens decide if they had to choose between the implementation of the MEI and the continuation of the bilateral strategy? We ground our analysis on data from the VOX surveys regarding the MEI and the more recent vote of November 2014 (Ecopop initiative). While Swiss voters still seem to be uncertain about the issue of compatibility, they nevertheless show support for the continuation of the bilateral agreements. Our analyses highlight the importance of age, trust in government and left-right orientation for individual opinions towards the bilateral way.
Comprehensive comparative analysis of EU referendums from 1972 to 2008
Variety of sources used including survey data, content analysis of media coverage, experimental studies, and elite interviews not found elsewhere in the literature
How do voters decide in referendums on European integration? Direct democracy has become an increasingly common feature of European politics with important implications for policy-making in the European Union. Attempts to reform the EU treaties have been stalled, and even abandoned, due to no-votes in referendums. Europe in Question sheds new light on the pivotal issue of electoral behaviour in referendums and provides a major contribution to the study of democracy in the European Union and voting behaviour more generally.
Hobolt develops a comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding voting behaviour in referendums and presents a comparative analysis of EU referendums from 1972 to 2008. To examine why people vote the way they do, the role of political elites and the impact of the campaign dynamics, this books relies on a variety of sources including survey data, content analysis of media coverage, survey experiments, and elite interviews. The book illustrates the importance of campaign dynamics and elite endorsements in shaping public opinion, electoral mobilization and vote choices. Referendums are often criticized for presenting citizens with choices that are too complex and thereby generating outcomes that have little or no connection with the ballot proposal. Importantly this book shows that voters are smarter than they are often given credit for. They may not be fully informed about European politics, but they do consider the issues at stake before they go to the ballot box and they make use of the information provided by parties and the campaign environment.
Readership: Scholars and students of political science, especially those interested in political behaviour, political parties, and European studies.
After the vote of 9 February 2014, many attributed the surprising result to voter ignorance. The basic claim was that the majority of those voting in favour of the initiative possessed only a weak understanding of what the likely outcome(s) would be if their choice prevailed. However, the analysis of the voters' knowledge level shows that they were comparably well aware of what the proposal at hand was about. Moreover, most voters voted their true preferences. They were also well aware about the possible economic ramifications acceptance could have for the relationship between Switzerland and the European Union and they were willing to take the risk. However, what should give the initiative's opponents a glimmer of hope is the fact that a majority believed that the principle of free movement would somehow be negotiable. Given the ongoing refusal of the EU to renegotiate that principle, these voters might have become less confident about its negotiability than they were before the vote. Februar 2014.
In this article, we propose a social psychological mechanism for the formation of new social change movements. Here, we argue that social change follows the emergence of shared injunctive social norms that define new collective identities, and we systematically spell out the nature of the processes through which this comes about. We propose that these norms and identities are created and negotiated through validating communication about a normative conflict; resulting in an identity-norm nexus (INN), whereby people become the change they want to see in the world. We suggest that injunctive norms are routinely negotiated, validated, and integrated with shared identity in order to create the potential to effect change in the world. Norms and identities need not be integrated or connected in this way, but the power of social actors to form new social movements to bring about sociopolitical change will tend to be severely limited unless they can bring about the integration of identity and action.
Voters in mass elections are notorious for their apparent lack of information about relevant political matters. While some scholars argue that an electorate of well-informed voters is necessary for the production of responsive electoral outcomes, others argue that apparently ignorant voters will suffice because they can adapt their behavior to the complexity of electoral choice. To evaluate the validity of these arguments, I develop and analyze a survey of California voters who faced five complicated insurance reform ballot initiatives. I find that access to a particular class of widely available information shortcuts allowed badly informed voters to emulate the behavior of relatively well informed voters. This finding is suggestive of the conditions under which voters who lack encyclopedic information about the content of electoral debates can nevertheless use information shortcuts to vote as though they were well informed.
This article challenges the often untested assumption that cognitive "heuristics" improve the decisionmaking abilities of everyday voters. The potential benefits and costs of five common political heuristics are discussed. A new dynamic process-tracing methodology is employed to directly observe the use of these five heuristics by voters in a mock presidential election campaign. We find that cognitive heuristics are at times employed by almost all voters and that they are particularly likely to be used when the choice situation facing voters is complex. A hypothesized interaction between political sophistication and heuristic use on the quality of decision making is obtained across several different experiments, however. As predicted, heuristic use generally increases the probability of a correct vote by political experts but decreases the probability of a correct vote by novices. A situation in which experts can be led astray by heuristic use is also illustrated. Discussion focuses on the implications of these findings for strategies to increase input from under-represented groups into the political process.
We propose a model of motivated skepticism that helps explain when and why citizens are biased-information processors. Two experimental studies explore how citizens evaluate arguments about affirmative action and gun control, finding strong evidence of a prior attitude effect such that attitudinally congruent arguments are evaluated as stronger than attitudinally incongruent arguments. When reading pro and con arguments, participants (Ps) counterargue the contrary arguments and uncritically accept supporting arguments, evidence of a disconfirmation bias. We also find a confirmation bias—the seeking out of confirmatory evidence—when Ps are free to self-select the source of the arguments they read. Both the confirmation and disconfirmation biases lead to attitude polarization—the strengthening of t2 over t1 attitudes—especially among those with the strongest priors and highest levels of political sophistication. We conclude with a discussion of the normative implications of these findings for rational behavior in a democracy.
Context:
Misperceptions are a major problem in debates about health care reform and other controversial health issues.
Methods:
We conducted an experiment to determine if more aggressive media fact-checking could correct the false belief that the Affordable Care Act would create "death panels." Participants from an opt-in Internet panel were randomly assigned to either a control group in which they read an article on Sarah Palin's claims about "death panels" or an intervention group in which the article also contained corrective information refuting Palin.
Findings:
The correction reduced belief in death panels and strong opposition to the reform bill among those who view Palin unfavorably and those who view her favorably but have low political knowledge. However, it backfired among politically knowledgeable Palin supporters, who were more likely to believe in death panels and to strongly oppose reform if they received the correction.
Conclusions:
These results underscore the difficulty of reducing misperceptions about health care reform among individuals with the motivation and sophistication to reject corrective information.
Why are Quebeckers favourably disposed or opposed to sovereignty? This choice partly depends upon the prospective evaluation of the costs and benefits of sovereignty and federalism. What are the relative contributions of economic and linguistic expectations in this choice? Does the impact of these expectations vary according to the time horizon in which they are set? The authors approach these questions from the perspective of the economic theory of voting and with the help of original measures of the determinants of support for sovereignty. They compare expectations of what would occur to the economy and to the French language were Quebec to become a sovereign country with expectations of what would occur if Quebec remained a province of Canada. These measures are taken from a survey of university students. Our logistic regression analysis shows that the implicit calculation of costs and benefits plays a significant role in the choice between sovereignty and federalism, and that economic expectations influence the formation of opinion to a somewhat greater degree than do linguistic expectations. Moreover, medium-term expectations are more important than short-term economic expectations and more important than long-term expectations about the situation of the French language in Quebec. © 1995, Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique. All rights reserved.
Scholars assume that citizens perform better when they know pertinent facts. Factual beliefs, however, become relevant for political judgments only when people interpret them. Interpretations provide opportunities for partisans to rationalize their existing opinions. Using panel studies, we examine whether and how partisans updated factual beliefs, interpretations of beliefs, and opinions about the handling of the Iraq war as real-world conditions changed. Most respondents held similar, fairly accurate beliefs about facts. But interpretations varied across partisan groups in predictable ways. In turn, interpretations, not beliefs, drove opinions. Perversely, the better informed more effectively used interpretations to buttress their existing partisan views.
This study investigates how the information environment in the Danish 2000 euro referendum campaign served to crystallize opinion on the issue within the context of a number of other hypothesized influences on the vote, based on previous studies of referendum voting. Our data include a nationally representative two-wave panel survey and a content analysis of news coverage during the referendum campaign. We develop a weighted measure of exposure to news on public and private television channels, that takes into account the volume and tone of the coverage towards the YES and NO campaigns, and using this we find that exposure to public television news significantly influences vote choice when controlling for other predictors. We also find varied levels of support for hypotheses concerning the influence of other key variables such as ideology, economic evaluations, government approval and issue-specific contextual variables. The findings emphasize the importance of considering the information environment during referendum campaigns.