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Category: Project

Description: Fetzer (2018) presents evidence from analyses of panel data at the constituency and individual levels, which suggest that austerity measures implemented by the Conservative-led Coalition government may have caused an increase in the Leave vote share by up to 9.5 percentage points. If Fetzer’s hypothesis were correct, one would expect aggregate Euroscepticism to increase after 2010, during the period of austerity. However, analyses of three separate polling series suggest the opposite, namely that aggregate Euroscepticism declined between 2010 and 2015. A plausible interpretation of this finding is that Euroscepticism peaked around the time of the Eurozone debt crisis, and was not strongly affected by austerity.