The politics of the Brexit debate abroad: an analysis of parliamentary questions on Brexit in Belgian parliaments

Abstract

The Brexit referendum in June 2016 marked a critical point for European integration and has quickly attracted attention from scholars. However, the literature so far has focused on the UK and the EU level, neglecting the symmetric risk exposures and the diverging views around Brexit within the Member states. This article aims at contributing to filling this gap by analyzing to what extent the attention paid to Brexit differs across parliaments in a multilevel setting and whether parties emphasize the same issue across different levels? It relies on a unique database of parliamentary questions in the Belgian (regional and federal) parliaments between 2013 and 2017 and combines social network analysis and a loglinear modeling to analyze how Brexit has been framed and discussed in Belgium.