In the 1975 referendum England provided the strongest support for European integration, with a much smaller margin for membership in Scotland and Northern Ireland. By 2015 the rank order of ‘national’ attitudes to European integration had reversed. Now, England is the UK's most eurosceptic nation and may vote ‘Leave’, while Scotland seems set to generate a clear margin for ‘Remain’. The UK as a whole is a Brexit marginal. To understand the campaign, we need to make sense of the dynamics of public attitudes in each nation. We take an ‘archaeological’ approach to a limited evidence‐base, to trace the development of attitudes to Europe in England since 1975. We find evidence of a link between English nationalism and euroscepticism. Whatever the result in 2016, contrasting outcomes in England and Scotland will exacerbate tensions in the UK's territorial constitution and could lead to the break‐up of Britain.

Called two years ahead of schedule, the 2012 Catalan election was held in a context of economic recession, controversial austerity measures, growing political disaffection, and increasing popular support for Catalonia's independence. The election was mainly marked by the decision of the incumbent moderate nationalists to advocate for the region's secession from Spain, in the wake of a massive rally in support of the independence of Catalonia. In this article we report on the context, the campaign, and the results of the election, and assess the likely reasons why an unexpectedly high number of voters chose to defect from the incumbent. Additionally, we use survey data to investigate the rapid conversion of a substantial portion of the Catalan public to favour independence, formerly regarded as a rather extreme position, after the 2010 Constitutional Court's controversial decision to curtail the region's reformed Statute of Autonomy.

Scotland is not the only sub‐state unit in Europe where relevant political actors make claims for independence. To generate insights on these independence demands, we compare the drivers, arguments and popular support for secession in Scotland, the Basque Country, Catalonia and Flanders. We argue that national identity, party politics and the economy are behind the independence requests, and the exact articulation of these elements varies from case to case. Currently, the most salient of these demands are the ones from Catalonia; Basque demands for self‐determination are less prominent than in the past, whereas the demand for a vote on independence is much less articulated in Flanders. Although the Scottish independence referendum has set a precedent for solving independence disputes, we argue that the possibilities of exporting the Scottish referendum experience to other realities are limited.

In this article, we examine the impact of risk attitudes on vote choice in the context of a salient referendum with high levels of uncertainty about the consequences of the ballot proposal. Using data from a pre-and post-referendum panel survey conducted in the context of the 2014 independence referendum in Scotland, and a specific battery to measure attitudes to risk, we determine how these attitudes operate in such political contexts. We reach two main conclusions. First, risk attitudes have a direct effect on vote choice, even after controlling for alternative explanations of vote choice such as party identification and leaders' evaluations. In the aggregate, the effect of risk attitudes on the vote choice contributes to the status quo bias found in referendums. Second, we find that information moderates the effect of risk attitudes on vote choice. Voters who are politically knowledgeable have a greater capacity to predict the consequences of political outcomes and, therefore, they are less affected by their risk attitudes when making their ballot choices.

No abstract