https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8937-5962
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ABSTRACT
We analyse public perceptions and misperceptions of European integration in the context of the Brexit referendum in the UK. Erroneous information about the EU was salient in the public domain before the referendum, but the prevalence of EU related misperceptions among voters has not yet been examined much. We use a population based survey that was conducted before the referendum to measure misperceptions in two domains: the role of the EU for the British economy and EU related costs. Hypotheses to explain misperceptions are derived from the public opinion literature and political psychology. Most voters hold misperceptions and this includes Euroskeptics as well as individuals who support the EU. Yet, misperceptions vary in systematic ways. Individuals with more education are less ill informed. In line with motivated reasoning, citizens’ perceptions are also biased by their predispositions: while many voters hold misperceptions, the magnitude of misperceptions that portray the EU negatively is greater among Euroskeptics.
Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this manuscript was presented at the meeting of the Standing Group on the EU of the ECPR in Paris in 2018 and at the final conference of the Kolleg-Forschergruppe “The Transformative Power of Europe” (KFG) at Freie Universität Berlin, also in 2018. We are grateful for feedback from Liesbet Hooghe, Peter Katzenstein, Hanna Kleider, Gary Marks, Thomas Risse and the anonymous reviewers. Jason Reifler received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No 682758). We would also like to thank Ipsos-MORI and the ESRC for making the survey data available. All remaining errors are our own.
Disclosure statement
The authors declare that they do not have any conflict of interests.
Data availability statement
The data used in this study is available on request from Ipsos-MORI UK. Ipsos acknowledges the ESRC as co-owner of the data. Ipsos-MORI UK can be contacted using this link: https://www.ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/en-uk/ipsos-mori/en-uk/contact
Notes
2 Karp, Banducci, and Bowler (Citation2003) measure EU related factual knowledge among citizens and relate this measure to satisfaction with democracy. Armingeon (Citation2021) examines the role of political knowledge for citizens' attitudes toward fiscal transfers between EU member states.
3 Hobolt’s analysis (2016, p. 10) finds differences in the perceptions of the EU between leave and remain voters. Leave voters do not think that the EU helped prevent a war or that it contributed too British prosperity in general and trade in particular.
4 Respondents were randomly selected from iOmnibus, which is Ipsos MORI’s standing online panel. Ipsos MORI acknowledges the ESRC as co-owner of the data.
5 Child benefits paid to families overseas because of Britain’s membership in the EEA have received sensational coverage in the UK media (e.g., Jowit Citation2012; Buchanan Citation2017).
6 The Ipsos MORI survey used a forced choice format for questions a, b, and c. While this can affect levels of misperceptions, our robustness checks suggest that this issue does not affect the relationships we examine. For instance, question “d” (child benefits) includes a “don’t know” category. All substantive results for question “d” resemble those we find for the other ones. See section “robustness checks”.
7 See the appendix for a detailed description of the coding.
8 A small share of respondents believes that the EU is more important economically for the UK than it actually is or that the share spend by the EU on administration is smaller than it is in reality. These responses have negative values on our dependent variable. We do not discard these responses in our main analyses, but we account for them in our robustness checks. The results indicate that including them does not affect the substantive results.
9 See the appendix for more detailed descriptive statistics of all variables.
12 The question was only asked to half of the sample of the survey that we use.
13 We split this group up into two roughly equally sized groups: respondents with minor misperceptions and respondents with large misperceptions.