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Abstract
The article develops a two-dimensional typology of political reasons for governments to pledge referendums on European integration when they are not obliged to do so: the first dimension is about the political level at which the strategic use of referendum pledges is targeted and it distinguishes between domestic and European reasons; the second dimension attends to the strategic mode of governments when pledging EU referendums which can either be about avoiding political losses (the defensive mode) or about realizing political gains (the offensive mode). In combination, the typology yields four ideal types of reasons for governments to commit to EU referendums: the depoliticizing; plebiscitary; red-line; and internationalist EU referendum pledges. In the empirical analysis, the article applies this typology to classify 28 cases of discretionary government commitments to EU referendums and it presents the findings of an expert survey that has been conducted for this purpose.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement no. 251172. I wish to thank Paul Taggart for his support throughout the project, as well as the participants of the expert survey for being so generous with their time and knowledge. I am also indebted to Sara Hobolt for her advice on an earlier draft of the article, and to the editor of JEPP and three anonymous reviewers for their excellent comments and suggestions.
Notes
It should be noted that the universe of cases is only made up of ‘positive’ cases in which government commitments to EU referendums did occur. This can be justified on two grounds. On a practical level, it would have been exceedingly difficult to select relevant instances of the potentially infinite number of ‘negative’ cases in which European issues may have triggered referendum pledges but didn't (see Ragin Citation2000: 59–61). One way to mitigate this problem in future research would be to investigate cases which have seen sustained referendum debates, but in which governments have ultimately decided against committing to popular votes. More importantly, the restriction on positive cases appears justified by the research interest of the article, which is to assess the relevance of different strategic political reasons in government decisions to pledge EU referendums across the whole spectrum of cases in which such pledges have been made (see Ragin Citation2000: 206–7). This is admittedly a more modest objective than to offer a full explanation for why governments sometimes commit to referendums and sometimes don't. In the latter case, a research design that includes no ‘negative’ cases and thus no variance on the dependent variable would indeed suffer from selection bias (see King et al. Citation1994: 129–37).
As an empirical point in case, the results of the expert survey show that the average score of expert judgements attributes at least a ‘somewhat important’ role (>2.5) to at least one of the suggested political reasons for governments to pledge referendums in 26 out of the 28 cases under study.
An alternative research design would have been to put the analysis under a regression framework. The focus would then have been on measuring the relative influence of each of the suggested political reasons individually as explanatory factors for discretionary EU referendum commitments. In contrast, the typological approach adopted here aims at identifying and systematizing the similarities and differences between the cases under study.
The selection of experts was guided by a review of the existing literature on the domestic politics of European integration in the countries in question. Thus, the participants of the survey are academics who have published on the European policy of the respective country and ideally on the referendums under study. In addition, many of the experts are – or have been suggested by – members of the European Parties Elections and Referendums Network at the Sussex European Institute. A full list of participants and the original data are available from the author on request. The survey was conducted from 18 to 22 October 2010, with a follow-up mailing on 22 November 2010.
A table with the full results of the expert survey is available on my personal website at http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/europeanstudies/people/staff/academic/oppermannk.aspx.
(a) There are obviously other possible approaches to locating the cases in the two-dimensional space. For example, the referendum pledges could have simply been classified according to which of the six political motivations included in the survey has received the highest score. Notably, this would have moved a number of cases from the European/offensive to the domestic/offensive quadrant of the typology. On balance, however, the approach employed in the article appears to better approximate the essence of the suggested typology. In particular, the underlying idea has been to transform the expert survey data on the role played by different specific political reasons for governments to commit to EU referendums into separate and more general scores on the two constitutive dimensions of the typology.
(b) The cases of government commitments to referendums on leaving the EC in Greenland and on joining the European Economic Area in Switzerland are the only two cases for which experts found that none of the suggested political reasons played at least a ‘somewhat important’ role.
(c) As for the 1994 accession referendum on the Åland Islands, experts judged that the regional government primarily pledged the referendum because it saw no other realistic way to obtain ratification for joining the EU. According to the survey, this reason played a ‘very important’ role and received an average score of 4.5.
The Social Democrats were committed to a referendum on Swedish EU membership from the start of the accession negotiations in 1991 when they were in opposition. The first government to pledge the referendum was the 1991–4 centre-right government under Prime Minister Carl Bildt. The commitment to put a decision on the euro to a referendum goes back to the 1994 accession debate and was reinforced on the Social Democrats' party congress in 2000. In both cases, experts acknowledge that the decisions in favour of referendums were to an important extent influenced by the judgment of governments that the issues would otherwise have been difficult to ratify.
The Socialists pledged the referendum in their 2004 general election manifesto which brought them to power. The Conservatives under Prime Minister Aznar similarly committed to a referendum on the TCE.
The Finnish case is ambivalent. Although the Finnish party system has been classified as a system of ‘limited contestation’ over Europe, it has also been acknowledged that there is a wider potential for Eurosceptic factionalism in the main parties and for inter-party competition on Europe that may from time to time become mobilized (Taggart and Szczerbiak Citation2008: 350–2). President Chirac's commitment to a referendum on an eventual accession of Turkey to the EU has, in turn, been shaped not only by domestic/defensive but to a significant extent also by domestic/offensive and European/defensive reasons. What is more, the issue of Turkish EU membership was exceptionally contested in French domestic politics.