Bulletin n. 1-2/2014 | ||
November 2014 | ||
Garry John |
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Emotions and voting in EU referendums | ||
in European Union Politics , vol. 15, n. 2, June , 2014 , 235-254 | ||
There is an emerging scholarship on the emotional bases of political opinion and behaviour and, in particular, the contrasting implications of two distinct negative emotions – anger and anxiety. I apply the insights in this literature to the previously unresearched realm of the emotional bases of voting in EU referendums. I hypothesise that anxious voters rely on substantive EU issues and angry voters rely on second-order factors relating to domestic politics (partisanship and satisfaction with government). Focusing on the case of Irish voting in the Fiscal Compact referendum, and using data from a representative sample of voters, I find support for the hypotheses and discuss the implications of the findings for our understanding of the emotional conditionality of EU referendum voting. | ||