The Meaningful Votes: Voting on Brexit in the British House of Commons

Abstract

Why do politicians rebel and vote against the party line when high stakes bills come to the floor of the legislature? To address that question, we leverage the three so-called Meaningful Votes that took place in the British House of Commons between January and March 2019 on the Withdrawal Agreement that the Conservative government had reached with the European Union. The bill was defeated decisively three times following a major revolt amongst Conservative backbench Members of Parliament (MPs). We find that three factors influenced their rebellion calculus: the MP's own ideological views, constituency preferences and career concerns. Somewhat paradoxically, the rebellion within the Conservative Party came from MPs who had supported Leave in the 2016 Brexit referendum and from MPs elected in Leave-leaning constituencies.

The Brexit Referendum and Three Types of Regret

“…The first is concerned with the characteristics of those that voted and theories as to why they voted the way that they did. The second literature is concerned with the consequences of Brexit in terms of future EU-UK relations, UK relationships with the rest of the world and the implications for the future of the UK economy, governance and indeed the sustainability of the UK itself (Aidt et al, 2021;Born et al, 2019;Chen et al, 2018;Johnson and Mitchell, 2017;Sampson, 2017). The analysis presented here falls in the first group by focusing on the referendum itself with attention also to the characteristics and motivation of non-voters.…”

Dominating the debate: visibility bias and mentions of British MPs in newspaper reporting on Brexit

“…These intra-party conflicts were prominently brought to the fore in early 2019. After Parliament's repeated failure to pass the withdrawal agreement negotiated by Theresa May (BBC 2019), a series of indicative votes highlighted that there was no majority for any of the proposed options (Aidt, Grey and Savu 2019). A peculiarity that is consistent with the strength of this division is the short-lived group Change UK.…”

“…Following a narrow victory of the Leave campaign, public opinion remained almost evenly divided (YouGov 2019). This division was mirrored in the British parliament, where votes on the withdrawal agreement and potential alternatives showed no clear majority for any solution (Aidt, Grey and Savu 2019).…”

Modeling of Opinion Formation Under Influence of Social Media for Analyzing Historical Events With Bengal Partition as Case Study

“…But this was too weak compared to the geographical spread enjoyed by the online social media of today. Recent Brexit debate has seen huge number of such cross votings mainly from Conservative party backbenchers and few Labour Party MPs as well in the British parliament, mainly because of various extraneous influences (Aidt et al, 2019).…”