15:00 - 16:40
P14
Room:
Room: South Hall 2B
Panel Session 14
Ekaterina Kolpinskaya, Stuart Fox - Religion and Euroscepticism in Brexit Britain
Andrés Bernstein - Political Misperceptions During the Brexit referendum Campaign
Alina Vranceanu - How do voters respond to elite polarization? Mass and party polarization on immigration in Europe
Religion and Euroscepticism in Brexit Britain
P14-1
Presented by: Ekaterina Kolpinskaya, Stuart Fox
Ekaterina Kolpinskaya 1Stuart Fox 2
1 University of Exeter
2 Brunel University London
Religion has a significant – and under-appreciated – effect on how Europeans feel about the European Union and has had an important impact on how people voted in the UK’s ‘Brexit Referendum’. This paper aims to examine the development of the relationship between religion and Euroscepticism in the UK since 1975, explain the dimensions and predictors of that relationship, and explore how it has changed the relationship between religion and voter behaviour in Britain in the aftermath of Brexit.
Using the British Election Study and the Understanding Society data, we show that while religion was certainly not the only or most influential characteristic to explain Brexit or the tumultuous years that followed, it did play an important and under-appreciated role in explaining why a sizeable chunk of British voters were more likely to vote ‘Leave’ in 2016 than we may otherwise expect. It also contributed to the rising salience of Euroscepticism as a political issue that helped put pressure on David Cameron to hold a referendum on EU membership in the first place, and the stunning victory for Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party in the 2019 general election that all but confirmed that the UK would in fact leave the European Union. The importance of religion to explaining and understanding Euroscepticism, therefore, means that it is vital to efforts to explain and understanding public opinion and voter behaviour in Europe and Britain for the foreseeable future.