Abstract
Referendums about the political authority of the European Union offer campaigners the opportunity to establish issue links between Europe and other topics, which can be more or less closely related. Because of this, and also as the result of a long tradition of second-ordering European issues to national affairs, the choices of voters in referendums about Europe are never entirely about the issue at hand.
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Notes
- 1.
Comparable policies used in similar experimental studies include, for instance, the delegation of political authority over employment policy to the European Union (Vössing and Weber 2016, 2017) or, alternatively, general assessments of the status and ramifications of European integration (Vössing 2015).
- 2.
A complete list of statements and other methodological details is available in an online appendix deposited on the author’s website at https://sites.google.com/site/konstantinvossing/ and on his dataverse page at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/vossing.
- 3.
Sometimes, as Petersen et al. (2013) have shown, voters will end up thinking intensely about the issue anyway, even after forming an opinion based on a party cue, especially when they feel the need to reconcile their partisanship with contradictory information about the issue.
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Vössing, K. (2020). How Politicians Ought to Talk About Europe: Lessons Learned from Experimental Evidence. In: How Referendums Challenge European Democracy . Palgrave Studies in European Union Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44117-3_6
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