Mapping party support for EU referendums after Brexit: results from an expert survey

ABSTRACT

The article maps party support for national EU-related referendums across the EU after Brexit. It is motivated by conflicting expectations about the trajectory of EU referendum politics in the post-Brexit environment which foreground either possible contagion or deterrent effects of the Brexit referendum. Against this background, the article explores the scope of party support for EU referendums in EU member states, which types of political parties endorse popular votes on European issues and how the Brexit experience has affected EU referendum support among European parties. To that purpose, the article presents novel data from an EU-wide (except Ireland) expert survey. The findings show that EU referendum support varies greatly between national party systems and that it comes mainly from Eurosceptic opposition parties, often on the populist far right. The impact of the Brexit precedent on party positions on EU referendums is relatively weak overall and uneven across parties.

KEYWORDS:

• EU referendums
• Brexit
• political parties
• politicisation
• Euroscepticism
• expert survey

Acknowledgments

I’m grateful to the academic experts who have participated in my survey for being so generous with their time and knowledge. I also wish to thank Anna Zoé Gobeli, Annemarie Schmitt, Paul Saleschke and Cynthia Wrage for their research assistance. Special thanks go to Patrick Thost for setting up the online survey.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. The intraparty dimension of EU referendum politics is beyond the scope of the expert survey that was conducted for this study.

2. For details see http://www.sussex.ac.uk/sei/research/europeanpartieselectionsreferendumsnetwork (accessed 29 August 2021).

3. The list of participants and a template of the survey are available in an online appendix.

4. An exception to this pattern is the Liberal People’s Party in Sweden, which has a policy of introducing the Euro by 2022 and supports a referendum to this purpose.

5. Pro-European motives are not at the forefront for the other three non-Eurosceptic supporters of EU referendums. The German CSU favours EU referendums as checks on further integration; Most in Croatia is undecided on the Euro, but wants the decision to be taken by popular vote; and the Czech Pirate party, while generally pro-European, supports EU referendums to strengthen direct democracy.

6. The exception is the Bridge of Independent Lists (Most) in Croatia, which is populist, but not Eurosceptic.

7. According to the experts, the Brexit effect was to strengthen EU referendum support of the following seven parties: Attack (BG), SPD (CZ), AfG (DE), DF (DK), PVV (NL), FvD (NL) and KWiN (PL). In contrast, the impact was to weaken EU referendum support for these seven parties: FPÖ (AT), CSU (DE), Red-Green Alliance (DK), EKRE (EE), LN (IT), SD (SE), L’SNS (SK).

8. I wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers for pointing out this methodological limitation of the expert survey.