Date: 2019
Type: Article
European but not European enough : an explanation for Brexit
European Union politics, 2019, Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 282-304
CARL, Noah, DENNISON, James, EVANS, Geoffrey, European but not European enough : an explanation for Brexit, European Union politics, 2019, Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 282-304
- https://hdl.handle.net/1814/70284
Retrieved from Cadmus, EUI Research Repository
To date, most accounts of the UK's vote to leave the EU have focussed on explaining variation across individuals and constituencies within the UK. In this article, we attempt to answer a different question, namely 'Why was it the UK that voted to leave, rather than any other member state?'. We show that the UK has long been one of the most Eurosceptic countries in the EU, which we argue can be partly explained by Britons' comparatively weak sense of European identity. We also show that existing explanations of the UK's vote to leave cannot account for Britons' long-standing Euroscepticism: the UK scores lower than many other member states on measures of inequality/austerity, the 'losers of globalisation' and authoritarian values, and some of these measures are not even correlated with Euroscepticism across member states. In addition, we show that the positive association between national identity and Euroscepticism is stronger in the UK than in most other EU countries. Overall, we conclude that Britons' weak sense of European identity was a key contributor to the Brexit vote.
Additional information:
First published online: 04 October 2019
Cadmus permanent link: https://hdl.handle.net/1814/70284
Full-text via DOI: 10.1177/1465116518802361
ISSN: 1465-1165; 1741-2757
Publisher: Sage Publications
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