EU Referendums Framed by Domestic Politics: President’s Motivations and Voters’ Attitudes in France

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Facing the decline of permissive consensus, EU member states increasingly use referendums on European issues in order to develop policy legitimacy. However, EU referendums can be used as an instrument for securing EU policy legitimacy only when they are used at the European level. We examine whether EU referendums are framed by European factors. Analysis of the French case at two levels—that is, political actors’ motivation and voters’ behavior—reveals that in both 1992 and 2005, the political actors’ decisions for calling an EU referendum were strongly related to their domestic strategic considerations, and that in non-required referendums, voters’ behavior is largely framed by domestic political context and thus is far from the ‘issue voting behavior’. These findings clearly indicate that EU referendums are closely related to domestic politics. Given the fact that EU referendums are strongly framed by the domestic political context, we can assume that EU referendums cannot be seen as an instrument for securing EU policy legitimacy.

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