Matt Qvortrup, Columnist

With Britain's EU Referendum, Timing is Everything

Lower turnout will help avert a British exit.

January 26, 2016 at 10:53 AM UTC

Matt Qvortrup is a professor of political science and international relations at Coventry University. His most recent book is "Referendums and Ethnic Conflict."

Should we stay or should we go?
Photographer: LEON NEAL/AFP/Getty Images

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If U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron seems in a hurry to hold his promised referendum on whether Britain stays in the European Union this summer, he should be. He is much more likely to lose if he waits until next year.

There are two reasons why questions of timing are likely to prove important for deciding Britain's future in Europe -- and perhaps as a result the nature and future of the bloc itself. The first is that, as I found when analyzing the results from 43 EU referendums for a recent paper, these have tended to favor the EU cause when the governments calling the votes had been in office for a short time. The second is that lower voter turnout helps.