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55 J. Common Mkt. Stud. 19 (2017)
Why Leave Won the UK's EU Referendum

handle is hein.journals/jcmks55 and id is 1490 raw text is: JCMS 2017 Volume 55. Annual Review pp. 19-37 Why Leave Won the UK's EU Referendum* JOHN CURTICE University of Strathclyde Introduction The outcome of the referendum on the UK's membership of the EU represents one of the biggest blows to the European project since the founding of the then Common Market in 1958. Greenland apart, the EU has gradually gained members rather than lost them. The resulting expansion has meant that it has come to encompass most of the continent west of Russia. Now it is not only set to lose a member, but also one of its bigger ones. This contribution attempts to explain how this outcome came about. Doing so has to be approached at more than one level. The most immediate explanation is provided by examining the attitudes and orientations that distinguished those who voted to Leave from those who voted to Remain. But on its own such an approach begs important questions. Why did voters hold the attitudes that they did about Brexit and the EU? What were the circumstances within which those attitudes were formed? Why did the campaign to Remain in the EU not prove more effective? We look at the circumstances that gave rise to the referendum and the circumstances in which it was held before turning to the issue of how voters' attitudes and evaluations were reflected in their choice on polling day. We should also bear in mind that the referendum on 23 June 2016 was not the first ballot that the UK had held on its membership of the EU. It had previously gone to the polls on 5 June 1975, when voters were asked whether or not they wished to remain in the Common Market that it had joined just two and half years previously (Butler and Kitzinger, 1976). That ballot, the UK's first nationwide referendum represented a major innovation in the country's constitutional history because direct democracy had hitherto been widely seen as incompatible with the principle of parliamentary sovereignty (Bogdanor, 2009). Substantively, however, the ballot served (at the time at least) to affirm the status quo, with voters backing the UK's membership by two to one. Second time around, however, the answer was very different. One particular question that therefore would seem worth bearing in mind is why the outcome in 2016 was so different from that of the ballot held 41 years earlier. I. Theory The UK's decision to leave the EU not only represents a challenge to the EU itself, but also to our theoretical understanding of how voters' attitudes towards the EU are shaped. If it has merit, that theory ought to help us to understand an outcome of a popular ballot * This contribution was written while the author was a Senior Fellow on the ESRC's 'The UK in a Changing Europe' initiative. It has profited from interchanges with participants at a wide variety of academic and non-academic events at which some or all of the analysis has been presented. 2017 University Association for Contemporary European Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd DOI: 10.1111/jcms.12613

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