BREXIT, voice and loyalty: rethinking electoral politics in an age of interdependence

ABSTRACT

In the wake of the United Kingdom's decision to leave the European Union, known as Brexit, scholars of international affairs have a chance to reflect on what this unanticipated event means for global politics. Many scholars have started applying standard political economy models based on the distributional consequences of trade or the sociotropic sources of individual policy positions to understand voter preferences. In this essay, we move the conversation using the lever of the New Interdependence Approach to reflect on the referendum process more generally. Rather than viewing globalization largely as an exogenous shock that is filtered through national institutions and cleavages, we argue that it has the potential to alter the political issue space as well as the institutional opportunities available to political actors. In conclusion, we push scholars of both comparative politics and international relations to develop a research agenda for electoral politics in an age of interdependence.

KEYWORDS:

• Brexit
• interdependence
• electoral politics
• globalization
• transnational
• opportunity structures

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We wish to thank @wanderingaengus and Brad DeLong for the title of this paper, Alex Pearson and Nikhil Kalyanpur for essential research assitance, and an anonymous reviewer and the editors of this journal for further extremely helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We are grateful to @wanderingaengus and Brad DeLong for the title of the paper.

2. And one only has to look across the channel to see similar dynamics at work in France with the Front National.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Henry Farrell

Henry Farrell is associate professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University. He works on a variety of topics, including trust, the politics of the Internet and international and comparative political economy. He has written articles and book chapters as well as a book, The Political Economy of Trust: Interests, Institutions and Inter-Firm Cooperation, published by Cambridge University Press.

Abraham Newman

Abraham Newman is an associate professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and Government Department at Georgetown University. He is the Director of the Mortara Center for International Studies and senior editor at International Studies Quarterly. His research focuses on the ways in which economic interdependence and globalization has transformed international politics and he is the author of Protectors of Privacy: Regulating Personal Data in the Global Economy (Cornell University Press 2008) and the co-editor of How Revolutionary was the Digital Revolution (Stanford University Press 2006). His work has appeared in a range of journals including Comparative Political Studies, International Organization, Science, and World Politics. For more information see http://explore.georgetown.edu/people/aln24/.