Abstract
In referendums on issues of European integration, it is often unclear how important attitudes toward Europe are and whether these attitudes change during the campaign. Extant research showing the importance of EU attitudes particularly in salient and contested referendums has often had to rely on static data and limited conceptualizations of EU attitudes. This potentially underestimates the role of (different types of) EU attitudes and hampers the ability to assess the dynamics of them. For the analysis of dynamics in EU attitudes, we mainly rely on pre- and post-waves for the Dutch Ukraine–European Union Association Agreement referendum, which extends a panel study leading back to the EP14 elections. This allows us to assess both long-term changes of EU attitudes since the last EP elections and also during the referendum campaign. We examine the effect of campaign-induced attitude changes for the referendum vote, while controlling for other relevant determinants. Our findings first show significant changes in EU attitudes during the referendum campaign, and second, highlight the relevance of some of these changes for the referendum vote. Both strengthening and especially emotional attitudes play respective significant roles, with the latter being in part dependent on media exposure.
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The same subsample of respondents were used for all time points (referendum voters who participated in all survey waves n = 495). a Performance, b Identity, c Utilitarianism, d Negative affect and e Strengthening
The dotted lines represent the 95% confidence interval after Bonferroni correction for five tested interactions
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Notes
We compared the salience of the EU in the media for the 2014 EP elections and the Dutch–Ukraine referendum in the five months prior to both events. The amount of general EU news items in the major Dutch newspapers and TV shows is just slightly lower in 2016. We want to thank Jan Kleinnijenhuis for having provided us with this information. The analysis to retrieve this media data was performed using the Amsterdam Content Analysis Toolkit (AMCAT) (van Atteveldt 2008).
In the literature, there is some discussion as to the sense of identity being an attitude, but as Hooghe and Marks (2005) argue what is tapped here is a sense of identification with an additional entity and not an exclusive sense of identity.
We tested for potential bias in sociodemographic variables due to panel attrition. All three variables age, gender and education are stable throughout all waves by displaying only minor changes with one percentage points more women (52% in wave 7) and two percentage points more higher educated respondents (36% in wave 7).
In general, we have a slight overestimation of turnout in our sample that is typical for post-election surveys (see, e.g., Sciarini and Goldberg 2016). However, our sample is very precise regarding the actual outcome of the referendum.
We ran this factor analysis to double check the presence of the five dimensions in our dataset. In both the pre- and post-waves, the four dimensions of negative affect, utilitarianism, performance, and strengthening load as separate factors. Only the identity dimension loses somewhat its standing as a separate factor and loads partly with performance and/or strengthening. One reason for this may be the fewer items that were used compared to Boomgaarden et al. (2011). Instead of the original 25 items, our dataset includes only 18 items. For theoretical reasons, we decided to still include identity as a separate dimension, also given the unclear loadings with two of our other dimensions in both waves. Table 5 displays the pattern matrix for a five-factor solution, with identity as a separate dimension.
The exact distribution of individual changes is displayed in Fig. 3 in the appendix.
Respondents with a “blank” vote intention in the pre-wave have been excluded from the table.
As a robustness check, we ran the same models (Table 7 in the appendix) with the reported vote intention before the referendum as dependent variable and using the attitude dimensions from the pre-wave (\(t_{1}\)). We find mostly similar effects, particularly the highly significant effects of utilitarianism and negative affect, with only the significant effect of strengthening that vanishes.
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A previous version of the paper was presented at the Annual Work Conference of the Netherlands Institute of Government (NIG) in Antwerp, 24–25 November 2016. The authors thank the participants and the two anonymous reviewers for valuable feedback. This research is funded by a Grant from the European Research Council (ERC), Grant No. 647316.
Appendix
Appendix
Individual changes in EU attitudes during referendum campaign. a Performance, b Identity, c Utilitarianism, d Negative affect and e Strengthening
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Goldberg, A.C., de Vreese, C.H. The dynamics of EU attitudes and their effects on voting. Acta Polit 53, 542–568 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41269-018-0106-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41269-018-0106-0