PhD Review: What Ends Justify the Means? Explaining Party Campaign Spending in European Referendums

Referendums are unpredictable and the preferences of voters can change sharply over the course of a campaign. The range of actors that participate in referendum campaigns is often much wider than at a typical election. And the intensity of that participation can also vary greatly, especially among political parties that occasionally have variable interest in the question being decided, could have to manage internal dissent and need to navigate often complex campaign finance arrangements. In his PhD thesis, Toine Paulissen tackles these complexities using party spending in a referendum campaign as the starting point for understanding and unpacking the nuances of political parties’ involvement in referendum decisions.