Braking and Exiting: Referendum Games, European Integration and the Road to the UK's Brexit Vote.

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 democra

SUBMITTER: Ganderson J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12065605 | biostudies-literature | 2025 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature