And Yet It Matters: Referendum Campaigns and Vote Decision in Eastern Europe

Referendums campaigns are important and earlier research closely

analysed their general functioning, effects on turnout, and the

importance of media and information for voting behaviour.

However, the role of referendum campaigns as such (with all its

components) in shaping voting behaviour was widely neglected.

This article seeks to partially fill this gap in the literature and

argues that referendum campaign is an important predictor of the

voting decision as long as people perceive it as informative and

follow it. We investigate this effect in the context of three

referendums organized in 2015–2016 in Bulgaria, Poland and

Slovakia. The results indicate that these two variables explain the

decision of citizens to support referendums across different

settings. Their effects are consistent and significantly stronger

than alternative explanations employed in the literature such as

the limited effect of campaigns, second-order elections, partisan

cues or amount of information received.