Moaners, Gloaters, and Bystanders: Perceived Fairness of the United Kingdom’s 2016 Referendum on the European Union
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321719891845 |
| Author | Florian S Schaffner |
| Date | 01 May 2021 |
| Published date | 01 May 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321719891845
Political Studies
2021, Vol. 69(2) 278 –306
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321719891845
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Moaners, Gloaters, and
Bystanders: Perceived
Fairness of the United
Kingdom’s 2016 Referendum
on the European Union
Florian S Schaffner
Abstract
Referendums divide the electorate into winners, losers, and abstainers. Research has shown that
these three groups tend to differ substantially in their evaluations of the fairness of a referendum.
However, no study has investigated the nature and determinants of citizens’ perceptions of
the fairness of a national referendum from long before until long after the vote. I address this
lacuna by studying perceived fairness of the Brexit referendum using a four-wave panel dataset
that tracks perceptions of fairness from before the referendum to 10 months after. The results
demonstrate that winners, losers, and abstainers differ significantly in their fairness expectations
and fairness evaluations after the vote and that the gap between them widened over time. Strength
of identification with the referendum camps substantially moderates perceived fairness. Winners
who expected to win did not expect the referendum to be conducted more fairly than winners
who expected to lose.
Keywords
fairness, expectations, referendums, direct democracy, social identity
Accepted: 30 September 2019
The literature has clearly established that winners, losers and abstainers tend to differ in
their evaluations of the fairness of a referendum or an election (e.g. Anderson et al., 2005;
Cho and Kim, 2016; Craig et al., 2006; Daniller, 2016; Marien and Kern, 2018; Moehler,
2009; Moehler and Lindberg, 2009; Norris et al., 2019). However, given the steady
increase in the number of referendums held in recent decades (Qvortrup, 2018) and the
extent to which perceived fairness of elections has been examined, it is remarkable that it
has not been investigated so far how citizens evaluate the fairness of a national referen-
dum from before casting a vote until long after the result is announced. It is essential to
Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Corresponding author:
Florian S Schaffner, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1
3UQ, UK.
Email: florian.schaffner@politics.ox.ac.uk
891845PSX0010.1177/0032321719891845Political StudiesSchaffner
research-article2020
Article
Schaffner 279
investigate citizens’ perceptions of the fairness of referendums because political decisions
made by referendum theoretically reflect the will of the majority of citizens who cast a
vote. Those who voted for the option which lost and those who abstained eventually have
to abide by the result and, ideally, they would ultimately concede that the process through
which the decision was made was fair. Hence, the ability to gain ‘loser’s consent’ can be
conceptualised as the quintessential consequence of a democratic procedure (Anderson
et al., 2005; Tyler and Van der Toorn, 2013).
With the act of making a political decision by referendum, a cleavage is created
between winners, losers and non-voters. However, the thrill of a victory may lead some
winners to a biased judgement of the quality of the referendum process and they may
experience excessive joy, which would mean that some of them could adequately be
described as ‘gloaters’. In contrast, those who lost the referendum may concede that the
referendum was conducted fairly, or some of them may become ‘moaners’, who go on to
complain about the result and blame an unfair process for the outcome. Finally, non-vot-
ers could be expected to be indifferent ‘bystanders’. Alternatively, some of them might
still hold strong opinions on the fairness of a referendum, despite not having cast a vote
personally. This article will shed light on how these three groups differ in their perceived
fairness before and after a national referendum and examine what factors contribute to
whether winners are gloaters, losers are moaners and abstainers are bystanders.
Before the referendum, citizens form an expectation about how fairly conducted the
referendum will be. With every referendum campaign, two ad hoc coalitions form: those
who campaign in favour of the proposal and those who campaign against. Citizens start to
feel close to either the proponents or opponents of the policy proposal. Some citizens feel
more strongly attached to their side than others, which may affect their perceptions of fair-
ness. When the result is announced, they realise if they are on the winning or losing side
and they update their fairness evaluation. After the referendum, they continue to re-evalu-
ate this evaluation based on their memory of the vote and their attitudes towards the imple-
mentation. Hence, when researching perceived fairness of referendums, we need to take
into account two important factors: First, the strength of citizens’ attachment to their side
in the referendum debate may intensify affective polarisation about the fairness of the vote
and moderate perceptions of fairness of the winning and losing camps. Second, citizens’
outcome expectations may affect perceptions of fairness. Consequently, in this article, I
analyse how winners, losers, and abstainers differ in their expectation of fairness, if there
are any changes in perceived fairness after the vote, if strength of identification with the
referendum camps affects perceived fairness, and the extent to which the gap between win-
ners, losers and abstainers is still pronounced 10 months after the referendum.
This article advances the literature by providing the first account of citizens’ individual
perceptions of the fairness of a national referendum in an advanced democracy over an
extended period before and after the vote. It studies if and how winners, losers and
abstainers differ in their perceived fairness from pre- to post-referendum using panel data
from the 2016 referendum on the United Kingdom’s membership in the European Union.
Panel data are well-suited to investigate the effects of referendums or elections on citi-
zens’ perceptions because they allow for controlling for pre-referendum levels and track
within-individual changes over time. However, two-wave panel studies are subject to
limitations in drawing conclusions on the stability of an observed effect, because they
only feature one pre- and one post-event wave. Consequently, this article uses a four-
wave panel study to determine the stability of the effects of the referendum on attitudes.
The first wave was conducted before the referendum to measure citizens’ expectations of
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