Brexit Domino? The Political Contagion Effects of Voter-endorsed Withdrawals from International Institutions

• Date: 01 November 2021
• Published date: 01 November 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/0010414021997169
• Subject Matter: Articles

2021, Vol. 54(13) 2382 –2415

https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414021997169

Comparative Political Studies

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DOI: 10.1177/0010414021997169

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Article

Brexit Domino? The

Political Contagion

Effects of Voter-endorsed

Withdrawals from

International Institutions

Stefanie Walter1

Abstract

This article examines the systemic implications of the growing popular

backlash against international cooperation and analyzes how voter-endorsed

attempts to withdraw from international institutions reverberate abroad.

Observing other countries’ disintegration experiences allows voters to

better assess the feasibility and desirability of such withdrawals. More

positive withdrawal experiences encourage exit-support abroad, whereas

negative experiences are likely to have a deterring effect. These contagion

effects will be conditioned by the availability of information and voters’

willingness to learn. The article empirically examines this argument for the

case of Brexit. It leverages original survey data from 58,959 EU-27 Europeans

collected in six survey waves during the Brexit withdrawal negotiations and

from a two-wave survey of 2,241 Swiss voters conducted around the first

Brexit extension in spring 2019. It finds both encouragement and deterrence

effects, which are bigger when respondents pay attention to Brexit and are

dampened by motivated reasoning.

Keywords

Brexit, international institutions, globalization backlash, withdrawal, diffusion

1University of Zurich, Switzerland

Corresponding Author:

Stefanie Walter, University of Zurich, Affolternstr. 56, Zurich 8050, Switzerland.

Email: walter@ipz.uzh.ch

997169

CPSXXX10.1177/0010414021997169Comparative Political StudiesWalter

research-article

2021

Walter 2383

2 Comparative Political Studies 00(0)

Introduction

International institutions have become increasingly contested in the past

years. Institutions as diverse as the EU, the Paris Climate Agreement, or

international courts have become salient and polarizing issues in national

public debates. Efforts to not only slow down, but to reverse international

integration have proliferated. The most prominent example of this phe-

nomenon is Brexit, the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the European

Union (EU). But other examples include the US’s 2020 withdrawal from

the Open Skies Treaty, Burundi’s 2017 and the Philippines’ 2019 with-

drawals from the International Criminal Court (ICC), or the increasing rate

of investment treaty terminations (Huikuri, 2020). Although skepticism

about the merits of international cooperation, exits from international trea-

ties, or even dissolutions of international organizations are nothing new,

the frequency with which they manifest themselves has increased in recent

years (Walter, 2021).

The spread of non-cooperative, or even disintegrative, tendencies is

widely seen as a threat to international institutions and international coopera-

tion more generally. Increasingly, these tendencies are endorsed by voters

through referendums or the election of parties and candidates who make non-

cooperation a centerpiece of their policy agenda. Against this backdrop, we

need to better understand how such attempts to revert or undermine interna-

tional institutions spread, how they can be contained, and which dynamics

they produce in the international arena. Whereas there is vast research on the

creation and functioning of international institutions and the integration pro-

cess more generally, the causes, dynamics, and consequences of international

dis-integration are not yet well understood (e.g., Jones, 2018; Schneider,

2017; Vollaard, 2014). A few studies examine under what circumstances

states withdraw from international institutions (Helfer, 2005, 2017; Shanks

et al., 1996; von Borzyskowski & Vabulas, 2019), and when international

organizations cease to function or even to exist (Crasnic & Palmtag, 2019;

Eilstrup-Sangiovanni, 2020; Gray, 2018). But we are still only at the begin-

ning of understanding how these processes are related, how they interact,

how they spread, and how they can be contained.

This paper contributes to a better understanding of these questions by

focusing on how voter-endorsed challenges to international institutions, one

of the most extreme expressions of the popular backlash against international

cooperation, reverberate internationally. I define such voter-endorsed chal-

lenges as instances in which one member state of an international institution

attempts to unilaterally change the terms of or withdraw from an existing

international institution on the basis of a strong popular mandate, such as a

2384 Comparative Political Studies 54(13)

Walter 3

referendum vote or a successful candidate’s key election promise (Walter,

2020b). Such voter-endorsed disintegration efforts have proliferated in recent

years: Among the twenty referendums on international issues that were held

worldwide between 2010 and 2019, for example, every second referendum

was on an issue that either implied the withdrawal from an international insti-

tution or non-compliance with or renegotiation of the rules of existing inter-

national institutions (see De Vries et al., 2021).

Voter-endorsed withdrawal or renegotiation efforts are challenging for

international institutions because they politicize questions of international

cooperation and about the costs and benefits of international disintegration

far beyond the country in which they originate. For example, after the Brexit

referendum vote, euphoric Eurosceptics across Europe, from France’s Marine

le Pen to the Slovak People’s Party-Our Slovakia, called for similar referen-

dums in their own countries. Similarly, the leaders of Spain’s Podemos or

Italy’s Five-Star-Movement celebrated Greece’s 2015 referendum-based bid

for a more generous bailout package, raising fears that it would spark similar

demands in other Eurozone crisis countries. As one country successfully

challenges an international institution, demands in other countries to follow

this example are likely to grow.

However, such political contagion does not always occur. For example,

the US withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, a prominent promise

of US President Trump’s election campaign, has not sparked strong popular

pressure for leaving the Accord in other countries. Faced with a threat to an

existing international institution, voters in the other member states some-

times even respond by mobilizing in support of the institution. For instance,

the 2016 presidential election that brought Donald Trump to power led to a

marked uptick in support for European integration among Europeans (Minkus

et al., 2018). Given that unilateral, voter-endorsed challenges to international

institutions may thus both reduce or strengthen voters’ support for interna-

tional cooperation in other countries, they provide a fertile ground for study-

ing the political contagion effects of such challenges.

I argue that voter-endorsed disintegration processes can create political

contagion effects abroad because they inform voters in other countries about

the likely economic, social, and political consequences of unilateral disinte-

gration efforts. This allows them to assess more accurately whether and to

what extent disintegration presents a viable and better alternative to mem-

bership in the international institution. The more successful another coun-

try’s disintegration experience, the more it encourages voters in other

countries from supporting a similar path for their own country, and vice

versa. The strength of these contagion effects is shaped by how easy it is for

voters abroad to obtain and process new information about the other