Brexit Dilemmas: Shaping Postwithdrawal Relations with a Leaving State

Abstract

How do voters want their governments to respond when another country unilaterally withdraws from an international institution? We distinguish between negotiation approaches that vary in the degree to which they accommodate the withdrawing state's demands and argue that negotiation preferences are shaped by two issues. The first is voters’ exposure to the costs and benefits of accommodation. This exposure varies across issues, and we argue that citizens will generally prefer non-accommodation on zero-sum issues, but support more accommodation on cooperation issues, where non-accommodation puts existing cooperation gains at risk. Second, withdrawal negotiations create precedents, and citizens should therefore be less willing to accommodate the more they are concerned about the ripple effects of accommodation on the institution's stability. These concerns also confront citizens with two types of dilemmas depending on how favorably they view the institution themselves. To test our argument, we use survey evidence and a conjoint experiment conducted in Germany and Spain during the Brexit negotiations. We find that respondents overall are more willing to accommodate the UK on cooperation issues than on zero-sum issues, but also find evidence that Euroskeptics and Europhiles confront different issue-specific dilemmas. Our paper contributes to a better understanding of the dynamics surrounding the challenges to multilateralism that have proliferated in recent years.

Brexit Domino? The Political Contagion Effects of Voter-endorsed Withdrawals from International Institutions

“…Non-accommodation, on the other hand, is attractive because it minimizes these risks, but at the same time is usually costly for everyone involved because of the foregone gains from cooperation. The resulting accommodation dilemma (Jurado et al, 2018; Walter, 2020a, 2020b) makes it genuinely difficult for voters to correctly predict how their country would fare if it left an existing international institution.…”

The show must go on: The EU's quest to sustain multilateral institutions since 2016

“…On the other, the EU disproportionally benefits from the institutional status quo. Reforms are likely to entail concessions of previously enjoyed privileges and also risk incentivising others to challenge multilateral institutions (see Jurado et al, 2022).…”

Is the grass greener on the other side? Benchmarking Covid-19 vaccine procurement against the British experience

“…Second, case studies on voting preferences in other EU states have been released (for instance Delis et al, 2020). Third, there has been research examining public preferences for the actual line in Brexit negotiations and post-withdrawal relations with the UK (Jurado et al, 2021;Walter, 2020). Fourth, and pursuing a somewhat different line of argument, researchers comparatively studied EU citizens' preferences for following the UK's example in leaving the community.…”