1. ^aNuffield College, Oxford OX1 1NF, UK. E-mail: Geoffrey.evans@nuffield.ox.ac.uk
2. ^bNational Centre for Social Research, 35 Northampton Square, London EC1V 0AX, UK. E-mail: s.butt@natcen.ac.uk

Abstract

Party-driven and voter-driven models of EU attitude change are compared using British survey data over 20 years. The dealignment of EU attitudes from the left–right politics dimension and growing magnitude of the effect of EU attitudes on Labour vs Conservative voting is consistent with an increasingly voter-driven process as the EU became more salient in the 1990s. The balance of influence would appear to have shifted from party-driven to voter-driven during the period under observation, though this probably results from the actions of the parties as well as external political events. The effective reversal of the position of the main parties during the 1980s followed by a period of intra-party division helped provide the conditions under which voter preferences on the EU were less constrained by elite signals.