Good news after all? Reactions to Brexit in national parliaments

ABSTRACT

National parliaments have been increasingly involved in EU affairs including in the reforms of EU institutions which, in most countries, they must ratify. How national parliamentarians (MPs) view and react to the challenge of Brexit is therefore of the uppermost significance for the future of European integration. The objective of this article is to analyse whether national MPs (outside the UK) see Brexit as a threat or an opportunity for the EU. It hypothesises that MPs’ evaluation of Brexit depends on three sets of factors: their ideology, their general attitude toward European integration and their country’s exposure to the consequences of Brexit. The empirical analysis relies on a survey of national MPs from nine EU countries conducted in 2017–2018. It shows that their perceptions of Brexit are part of a broader set of attitudes toward European integration and that there is a cleavage between pessimist and optimist MPs.

KEYWORDS:

• Brexit
• elite survey
• European integration
• parliaments
• political attitudes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. One exception is the study by Oliver (2016) of non-British elites’ views on Brexit.

2. This quote is from a debate in the Bundestag on 28 June 2016 (https://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/brexit-debatte-im-live-ticker-jetzt-diskutiert-der-bundestag-ueber-die-zukunft-europas_id_5676064.html consulted on 25/06/2019).

3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtCaUmqiqoc (consulted on 26/06/19).

4. ‘The consequences of Brexit in this matter (the export toward the UK of agricultural and plant products, fertilizer etc.) will be particularly difficult for the Belgian’ (written question of Philippe Goffin, MR (06383), Chamber of Representatives, Belgium, 6 June 2018).

5. French MPs expressed concern about the ‘probable budget reductions brought about by Brexit’ in relation to defence (European resolution on European Defense and its articulation with NATO. 7 April 2018).

6. ‘The development of the Paris stock exchange in the context of Brexit’ (National Assembly, 11 October 2017, Text of the Committee on Finance, the General Economy, and Budgetary Control. Annexe to the report on the draft of the public finance programming bill 2018 to 2022.

7. (Jean Glavany, French MP, hearing of Jean-Marc Ayrault by the Foreign Affairs Committee, 5 July 2016).

8. The logarithmic form has been preferred under the assumption that each additional year spent in parliament has a decreasing marginal impact on the dependent variable.

9. This is also why we opted to compute robust standard errors, which provide us with a general test of significance that does not depend on normality and homoscedasticity (two assumptions somehow violated by our data).

10. Although the coefficient of Poland reaches the standard level of statistical significance only on models a and b.

11. It has been noted, indeed, how, with Brexit, Poland will lose its most important economic (but also political) partner in the EU. Poland, in particular, has traditionally had a trade surplus with the UK (the UK being also a traditional destination of Polish emigration). Poland and UK, moreover, have shared common positions on the future development of European Integration and on eastern policy, with particular regard to Russia-Ukraine relations (Borońska-Hryniewiecka 2019).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the EUENGAGE project of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 649281 — EUENGAGE — H2020-EURO-2014-2015/H2020-EURO-SOCIETY-2014.