Abstract
This paper deals with the question of how voters behave in referendums. More specifically, the question is whether referendums on EU treaties are decided by the voters’ attitudes in general, and to Europe in particular (the issue-voting explanation), or by the voters’ attitudes to their national political parties and incumbent national government (the second-order election explanation)? In the first section, a theoretical model for referendum behaviour is presented and discussed. In the next section some expectations derived from the model are applied to the 2005 EU referendums in Spain, France, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. No empirical test of precise hypotheses is made, as the necessary data for such tests was not available at the moment of writing, but an attempt is made to outline under what circumstances the voting in referendums is determined by the attitudes of the voters or by cues from reference groups.
The paper is an abbreviated and updated version of a paper presented at the panel on “Direct Democracy in Europe—comparative and transnational perspectives”, the 3rd ECPR Conference, Budapest, 8–10 September 2005.
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Svensson, P. (2007). Voting Behaviour in the European Constitution Process. In: Pállinger, Z.T., Kaufmann, B., Marxer, W., Schiller, T. (eds) Direct Democracy in Europe. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-531-90579-2_12
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