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HYPOTHESIS AND THEORY article

Front. Polit. Sci.
Sec. Political Participation
Volume 6 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpos.2024.1383485
This article is part of the Research Topic Fake News, Disinformation and Post-Truth Politics: Comparing the European Union and other Western Democracies View all articles

Agency and Structure in the Age of European Disintegration

Provisionally accepted
Vittorio Orlando Vittorio Orlando *Maximilian Conrad Maximilian Conrad
  • University of Iceland, Reykjavik, Iceland

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    This article analyses the causal factors behind the Brexit vote, aiming to contribute to the literature on European disintegration.It addresses how, amidst external factors such as the EU debt crisis and the 2015 refugee crisis, pre-existing ideological forces deeply ingrained in a society can surface and steer a country's trajectory in relation to European integration. Employing a rigorous process-tracing design, it highlights the forces that led to the referendum and its outcome, identifying key patterns that can be extrapolated to comparable cases within the field of EU integration theory. The analysis operates at two levels: it scrutinizes the constraints faced by Cameron's government in the lead-up to the vote, and it probes the British electorate's attitude towards EU and how it was influenced by the Leave campaign. The study draws from an empirical case to identify some of the patterns of this ongoing political process.

    Keywords: Brexit, EU disintegration, member state politics, United Kingdom, referendum, constructivism

    Received: 07 Feb 2024; Accepted: 25 Jun 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Orlando and Conrad. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Vittorio Orlando, University of Iceland, Reykjavik, Iceland

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