Should I stay or should I go? British voter you got to let me know! Prime Ministers, intra-party conflict, and membership referendums in the British Westminster model
| Author | Xiao Lu,Thomas König |
| Published date | 01 October 2020 |
| Date | 01 October 2020 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0951629820956273 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Journal of Theoretical Politics
2020, Vol.32(4) 557–581
ÓThe Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0951629820956273
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Should I stay or should I go?
British voter you got to let
me know! Prime Ministers,
intra-party conflict, and
membership referendums in
the British Westminster
model
Thomas Ko
¨nig
Department of PoliticalScience, University of Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany
Xiao Lu
Collaborative ResearchCenter 884, University of Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany
Abstract
We explain the referendums on British membership of the European Communities and European
Union from a principal–agent perspective between the Prime Minister and the rank-and-file. We
show that announcing a referendum on the Prime Minister’s membership proposal helps the
incumbent party to win the general election when the rank-and-file is divided on the terms of
membership. When the Prime Minister overcomesthe rank-and-file’s mistrust of her effectiveness
in negotiating new membership terms with other member states, the voters are more likely to
follow her proposal. However, when intra-party controversies reveal principal–agent problems,
the initially uninformed voters can learn about the dysfunctionality of the terms and are more
likely to reject the Prime Minister’s proposal.
Keywords
Brexit; intra-party conflict; PrimeMinister; referendum; Westminster model
Corresponding author:
Thomas Ko
¨nig, Department of Political Science,University of Mannheim, A5, 6, 68159 Mannheim,Germany.
Email: koenig@uni-mannheim.de
1. Introduction
Research on the British vote to leave the European Union (EU) has emphasized the
increasing economic (Colantone and Stanig, 2018), societal (Hobolt, 2016), and cul-
tural (Inglehart and Norris, 2016) division of British voters. This demand-side per-
spective explains the British decision to leave the EU as a result of electoral
polarization, which creates ‘‘a tension between functional pressures for integration
and nationalist resistance that is part of a wider divide across Europe’’ (Hooghe and
Marks, 2019: 1123). In addition to this demand-side explanation, our research
attempts to draw attention to a supply-side mechanism from a complicated policy-
making process in the British Westminster model. This process begins with the
Prime Minister’s announcement of a referendum on the membership terms, which
the Prime Minister promises to renegotiate after the general election. The party may,
in turn, support the Prime Minister’s referendum announcement that promotes elec-
toral success. Given electoral success, the Prime Minister can make efforts to rene-
gotiate new terms, from which the party infers the Prime Minister’s negotiation
effectiveness. The party can support or criticize the Prime Minister’s proposal on the
new terms, on which the voters finally decide in the membership referendum.
Compared with demand-side explanations, our analysis does not posit that the
economic, societal, and cultural division among British voters have changed
between the announcement of the membership referendum by Harold Wilson in
1973 and David Cameron 40 years later. Neither the Labour Party in the 1970s
nor the Conservatives in the 2010s were united on their view of the functionality of
the British membership terms. Because both parties were divided on specific terms,
Harold Wilson and David Cameron announced to delegate the membership deci-
sion to the voters. They promised to hold a referendum on their membership pro-
posal after negotiations of the more specific membership terms. Both surprisingly
won the general election and started to renegotiate the terms with the other mem-
ber states: Harold Wilson with the six founding members and David Cameron with
27. After the negotiations with the six members, the Labour party was convinced
of Harold Wilson’s effectiveness and supported his membership proposal, while
David Cameron’s Conservative Party remained skeptical and revealed information
about his ineffectiveness to the voters by their criticism of the new terms.
In the British Westminster model, which unites rather than separates policy-
making power and authority in the hands of the Prime Minister, the reason for the
delegation of an important policy decision from the party to the voters can only be
partly explained by opportunistic office-seeking behavior of the Prime Minister,
which postfunctionalism calls a Mephistophelean pact for winning the general elec-
tion.
1
In addition to office-seeking behavior, we argue that the principal–agent rela-
tionship on the membership terms between the policy-seeking rank-and-file and the
Prime Minister is a crucial component for understanding the referendumannounce-
ment and membership decision. While the Prime Minister and the rank-and-filecan
gain electoral support from the referendum proposal, the voters may learn after-
wards from the revelation of intra-party policy conflict about the ineffectiveness of
the Prime Minister in renegotiating functional membership terms.
558 Journal of Theoretical Politics 32(4)
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