A Tale of Two Referendums: 1975 and 2016

Saunders, Robert A.

doi:10.1111/1467-923x.12286

Cited by 26 publications

(14 citation statements)

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“…The point of departure used for the shorter time frame is the return of the Conservatives to office in May 2010. Contrary to those who insist that Cameron precipitated an unnecessary crisis of Britain's membership by calling an avoidable referendum (Glencross, 2016;Saunders, 2016;Vail, 2015), I argue that the underlying structural forces generated by Britain's singular macro-political economy created a relatively high degree of probability that the denouement of Britain's membership of the EU would be reached under the conditions of the Conservative party being in office.…”

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confidence: 60%

Inevitability and contingency: The political economy of Brexit

Thompson

2017

The British Journal of Politics and International Relations

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Placing Britain's vote on 23 June 2016 to leave the European Union in historical time raises an immediate analytical problem. What was clearly the result of a number of contingencies, starting with the 2015 general election where we can see how events could readily have turned out otherwise and was a shock to the British government that had not prepared for this outcome might also represent the inevitable end of Britain's membership of the EU seen from the distant future. This paper seeks to take both temporal perspectives seriously. It aims to provide an explanation of the vote for Brexit that recognises the referendum result as politically contingent and also argue that the political economy of Britain generated by Britain's position as non-euro member of the EU whilst possessing the offshore financial centre of the euro zone and Britain's eschewal in 2004 of transition arrangements on freedom of movement for A8 accession states made Brexit an eventual inevitability, saving a prior collapse of the euro zone.

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confidence: 60%

Inevitability and contingency: The political economy of Brexit

Thompson

2017

The British Journal of Politics and International Relations

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“…For many years, the EU was 'the dog that didn't bark' in British electoral politics. Labour itself was somewhat hostile to joining the European Economic Community before and after the 1975 referendum, but Harold Wilson, the leader of the party in government, successfully obtained strong support for staying in the EEC (Saunders 2016 (Billig 1978;Fielding 1981). 2 In general, there was little sign of a new electoral alignment along a social dimension of political competition (Heath et al 1990).…”

Section: The Emergence Of the Pre-conditions For Dimensional Realignmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Immigration, Euroscepticism, and the rise and fall of UKIP

Evans

Mellon

2019

Party Politics

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This paper presents a case study of the emergence of the issue-linkage necessary for a cross-cutting EU cleavage to become electorally salient. We argue that a key political decision on immigration in 2004 facilitated the emergence of a new dimension of party competition and growth in popular support for the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) leading eventually to the 2016 EU Referendum. To examine this thesis we trace the impact of the UK's government's immigration policy on (i) rising immigration, (ii) the political salience of immigration, (iii) the increasing association between concern about immigration and Euroscepticism, and (iv) the emergence of a cross-cutting dimension of party competition coalescing around support for UKIP. The analysis combines information from official immigration rates, media reporting on immigration, Mori polls, Continuous Monitoring Surveys, and the British Election Study.

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“…In a way, Cameron gambled what he regarded to be Britain’s economic future on an always rather tenuous strategy for re-uniting his party – and one that failed so spectacularly that it ended up costing him his own job and which still threatens to split the party today. Yet in so doing, he was arguably not entirely unlike Harold Wilson in 1975 (see also Saunders, 2016). But what Wilson got right, Cameron got catastrophically wrong – in large part because of the rather different political context in which their respective forms of brinkmanship were played out.…”

Section: The Making Of the Vote For Brexitmentioning

confidence: 99%

Brexistential Angst and the Paradoxes of Populism: On the Contingency, Predictability and Intelligibility of Seismic Shifts

Hay

2019

Political Studies

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The time-travelling political scientist stepping out of her time machine today, having started her journey even 5 years earlier, would be amazed and, no doubt, shocked by the world in which she found herself. What sense, if any, might she make of British politics after the vote for Brexit – and, indeed, of the politics which gave rise to it? And what does the answer to that question tell us about how the vote for Brexit happened, how it was allowed to happen, its wider implications (both political and economic) and the seismic changes in and through which British politics is currently being remade? In an inevitably prospective and necessarily provisional way, I seek to reflect on the paradoxes of populism and neoliberal globalism that Brexit reveals as a way of drawing out a few of its implications for the conduct of British political analysis in a world in which Brexit could happen yet was essentially unforeseen.

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A Tale of Two Referendums: 1975 and 2016

Cited by 26 publications

References 0 publications

Inevitability and contingency: The political economy of Brexit

Inevitability and contingency: The political economy of Brexit

Immigration, Euroscepticism, and the rise and fall of UKIP

Brexistential Angst and the Paradoxes of Populism: On the Contingency, Predictability and Intelligibility of Seismic Shifts

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