Europe in Question: Referendums on European Integration

How do voters decide in referendums on European integration? Direct democracy has become an increasingly common feature of European politics with important implications for policy-making in the European Union. Attempts to reform the EU treaties have been stalled, and even abandoned, due to no-votes in referendums. Europe in Question sheds new light on the pivotal issue of electoral behaviour in referendums and provides a major contribution to the study of democracy in the European Union and voting behaviour more generally.Hobolt develops a comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding voting behaviour in referendums and presents a comparative analysis of EU referendums from 1972 to 2008. To examine why people vote the way they do, the role of political elites and the impact of the campaign dynamics, this books relies on a variety of sources including survey data, content analysis of media coverage, survey experiments, and elite interviews. The book illustrates the importance of campaign dynamics and elite endorsements in shaping public opinion, electoral mobilization and vote choices. Referendums are often criticized for presenting citizens with choices that are too complex and thereby generating outcomes that have little or no connection with the ballot proposal. Importantly this book shows that voters are smarter than they are often given credit for. They may not be fully informed about European politics, but they do consider the issues at stake before they go to the ballot box and they make use of the information provided by parties and the campaign environment.

Table of Contents:
List of Figures List of Tables Preface Part One: The Theoretical Framework 1: Introduction: Referendums in a European Context 2: A Theory of Referendum Behaviour Part Two: A Comparative Study of Referendum Behaviour 3: A Comparative Analysis of Voting Behaviour 4: Campaign Effects in Referendums 5: Framing Effects in Referendums: Experimental Evidence Part Three: Case Studies 6: Voter Competence: What do Voters Need to Know? 7: From No to Yes: The Danish and Irish Referendums on the Maastricht and Nice Treaties 8: Campaign Dynamics in the Referendums on the European Constitution Part Four: Conclusions and Implications 9: Lessons and Future Challenges Appendix 1: List of data sources Appendix 2: Descriptive statistics Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Sara Binzer Hobolt is Lecturer in Comparative European Politics at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford. She has published widely on referendums, elections, public opinion, and European integration.

Review :
Hobarts book can be seen as advanced puzzle-solving that is, her research fills out the gaps and adds new exemplars to the existing paradigmatic framework of the reasoning voter... This is a specialist study, and not a book for the masses. But this does not change the fact that Europe in Question is a scholarly and erudite book that answers many of the questions regarding why voters have on occasion defied their leaders and voted no to further European. integration. By looking at both the contextual and the individuals levels, the author presents a spatial proximity model of voting...The conclusions and observations provided challenge the all-too-often instrumental logic used by the EU, whereby it is believed that more information on the benefits of the EU will result in more yes votes and in a more pro-European attitude...all in all, this book is a magnificent and fluent read for anyone interested in voting behaviour and the challenges of direct democracy.