Learning from precedent: how the British Brexit experience counteracts populism outside the UK

Abstract

With the recent rise of nationalist populism, international institutions worldwide have wit-nessed an increase in animosities, boycotts, and withdrawals. The British withdrawal from the European Union arguably marks the most significant instance of this phenomenon to date. A growing literature examines the origins of populist successes such as the Brexit vote and ex-plores if similar economic, social, and political conditions could fuel equivalent disintegration processes elsewhere. However, less is known about the extent to which such withdrawal epi-sodes themselves affect populist pressures for re-nationalization. In this paper, we argue that because the first large-scale disintegration episodes such as Brexit provide new information about the feasibility and desirability of re-nationalization policies, they will affect partisan dis-course about similar populist projects in other countries: Depending on the success of such precedents, populists abroad will be encouraged or deterred to follow a similar path. We ex-plore this argument based on a quantitative text analyses of media reports in selected Euro-pean countries. Our results show that populists in Europe significantly moderate their de-mands as the Brexit-drama unfolds, suggesting that Brexit provides a reality check for populist pro-Leave arguments. We simultaneously see intra-EU cohesion increase and mainstream dis-course become more pro-European. We discuss the implications of our findings for populism and international institutions more generally.