A little justification goes a long way: audience costs and the EU referendum

That governments may not always keep their election promises or that they change policy positions may be unsurprising. However, failed promises, backing down on threats or flip-flopping on policy positions may be associated with a loss in support. Bringing together literature on the politics of electoral promises, policy shifts and audience costs, we examine the conditions under which a political leader can back down on a promise, using the EU referendum in the UK as a case study. Based on a survey experiment conducted in the aftermath of the 2015 general election, we examine whether justifications grounded on electoral motives, internal and external opposition would have allowed then Prime Minister David Cameron to avoid paying audience costs for going back on his campaign promise. Our results indicate that domestic audience costs might have been manageable, with only slightly more than a quarter of the participants in our study punishing executive inconsistency regardless of the justification employed. Of particular interest for European Union scholars, justifying backing down due to opposition from other EU member states is particularly effective in mitigating domestic audience costs.