{"title":"刹车与退出:公投游戏、欧洲一体化和英国脱欧投票之路","authors":"Joseph Ganderson, Anna Kyriazi","doi":"10.1177/14789299241239002","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"The UK’s in-out referendum on European Union membership is often attributed to an incompatibility inherent in the UK–EU relationship, or else a rising tide of Euroscepticism forcing a reckoning. We argue that the referendum should be understood as the culmination of parliamentary ‘referendum games’ in the preceding years, whereby backbenchers periodically applied pressure to office-seeking leaders who strategically defused this by promising public votes. These games were episodic and escalatory, coinciding with integrative European treaties which activated transient Eurosceptic backlashes. While referendum avoidance was personally rational, leaders’ repeated parlays created a standalone referendum politics, ratcheting up the intensity of backbench demands based on past promises and democratic renewal. After the Lisbon Treaty, a tipping point was reached, transforming calls for a ‘brake’ on integration to demand for binary ‘exit’ vote at the next treaty moment. This accompanied the Euro-area crisis in 2011, effectively ending David Cameron’s discretion to continue the game. To show this, we plot all mentions of EU-related referendums and adjacent terms in the House of Commons between 2000 and 2015. We descriptively identify five peak salience flares around EU treaty moments and then analyse 263 interventions by Members of Parliament to show how referendum pressure ratcheted up over time.","PeriodicalId":46813,"journal":{"name":"Political Studies Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4000,"publicationDate":"2024-04-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":"{\"title\":\"Braking and Exiting: Referendum Games, European Integration and the Road to the UK’s Brexit Vote\",\"authors\":\"Joseph Ganderson, Anna Kyriazi\",\"doi\":\"10.1177/14789299241239002\",\"DOIUrl\":null,\"url\":null,\"abstract\":\"The UK’s in-out referendum on European Union membership is often attributed to an incompatibility inherent in the UK–EU relationship, or else a rising tide of Euroscepticism forcing a reckoning. We argue that the referendum should be understood as the culmination of parliamentary ‘referendum games’ in the preceding years, whereby backbenchers periodically applied pressure to office-seeking leaders who strategically defused this by promising public votes. These games were episodic and escalatory, coinciding with integrative European treaties which activated transient Eurosceptic backlashes. While referendum avoidance was personally rational, leaders’ repeated parlays created a standalone referendum politics, ratcheting up the intensity of backbench demands based on past promises and democratic renewal. After the Lisbon Treaty, a tipping point was reached, transforming calls for a ‘brake’ on integration to demand for binary ‘exit’ vote at the next treaty moment. This accompanied the Euro-area crisis in 2011, effectively ending David Cameron’s discretion to continue the game. To show this, we plot all mentions of EU-related referendums and adjacent terms in the House of Commons between 2000 and 2015. We descriptively identify five peak salience flares around EU treaty moments and then analyse 263 interventions by Members of Parliament to show how referendum pressure ratcheted up over time.\",\"PeriodicalId\":46813,\"journal\":{\"name\":\"Political Studies Review\",\"volume\":null,\"pages\":null},\"PeriodicalIF\":1.4000,\"publicationDate\":\"2024-04-17\",\"publicationTypes\":\"Journal Article\",\"fieldsOfStudy\":null,\"isOpenAccess\":false,\"openAccessPdf\":\"\",\"citationCount\":\"0\",\"resultStr\":null,\"platform\":\"Semanticscholar\",\"paperid\":null,\"PeriodicalName\":\"Political Studies Review\",\"FirstCategoryId\":\"90\",\"ListUrlMain\":\"https://doi.org/10.1177/14789299241239002\",\"RegionNum\":3,\"RegionCategory\":\"社会学\",\"ArticlePicture\":[],\"TitleCN\":null,\"AbstractTextCN\":null,\"PMCID\":null,\"EPubDate\":\"\",\"PubModel\":\"\",\"JCR\":\"Q2\",\"JCRName\":\"POLITICAL SCIENCE\",\"Score\":null,\"Total\":0}","platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Political Studies Review","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14789299241239002","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"POLITICAL SCIENCE","Score":null,"Total":0}
Braking and Exiting: Referendum Games, European Integration and the Road to the UK’s Brexit Vote
The UK’s in-out referendum on European Union membership is often attributed to an incompatibility inherent in the UK–EU relationship, or else a rising tide of Euroscepticism forcing a reckoning. We argue that the referendum should be understood as the culmination of parliamentary ‘referendum games’ in the preceding years, whereby backbenchers periodically applied pressure to office-seeking leaders who strategically defused this by promising public votes. These games were episodic and escalatory, coinciding with integrative European treaties which activated transient Eurosceptic backlashes. While referendum avoidance was personally rational, leaders’ repeated parlays created a standalone referendum politics, ratcheting up the intensity of backbench demands based on past promises and democratic renewal. After the Lisbon Treaty, a tipping point was reached, transforming calls for a ‘brake’ on integration to demand for binary ‘exit’ vote at the next treaty moment. This accompanied the Euro-area crisis in 2011, effectively ending David Cameron’s discretion to continue the game. To show this, we plot all mentions of EU-related referendums and adjacent terms in the House of Commons between 2000 and 2015. We descriptively identify five peak salience flares around EU treaty moments and then analyse 263 interventions by Members of Parliament to show how referendum pressure ratcheted up over time.
期刊介绍:
Political Studies Review provides unrivalled review coverage of new books and literature on political science and international relations and does so in a timely and comprehensive way. In addition to providing a comprehensive range of reviews of books in politics, PSR is a forum for a range of approaches to reviews and debate in the discipline. PSR both commissions original review essays and strongly encourages submission of review articles, review symposia, longer reviews of books and debates relating to theories and methods in the study of politics. The editors are particularly keen to develop new and exciting approaches to reviewing the discipline and would be happy to consider a range of ideas and suggestions.