To Call or Not to Call? Political Parties and Referendums on the EU’s Constitutional Treaty

Abstract

Why did some political parties in the EU member states support and others oppose a facultative referendum on the Constitutional Treaty? The authors argue that electoral competition played a major role in determining how parties positioned themselves with respect to the desirability of a referendum. Parties that expected electoral gains supported and those that expected electoral losses opposed a referendum. The hypotheses that the authors derive from this argument draw attention to variables such as public support for the treaty, the closeness of the next elections, party size, and public demand for a referendum. An original data set that comprises the positions of 176 parties on whether to submit the Constitutional Treaty to a referendum allows the authors to examine these hypotheses empirically. Using a multilevel logistic regression model, they find support for their argument, even when controlling for party ideology and institutional constraints.