Partisanship or cognitive mobilisation? A case study of the 2003 Czech EU accession referendum

The literature which explores public opinion formation processes in the newly democratised EU member states in Central and Eastern Europe is divided into competing schools of thought; one, which presumes that the inexperienced electorates in the newly democratised states would adopt the views of their preferred political elites in political debates, and one opposing view, which argues that despite being fresh in the experience as political actors, voters employ cognitive resources when making political choices without depending on elite recommendations. While research on demographic characteristics and party affiliations’ importance on people’s political choices have been conducted, and also drawn various conclusions, there is still a lack of research which conducts analyses of multiple voter proxies to ad-hoc issues. This paper wishes to contribute to this field of research by testing a model which poses that the message environment and direction of elite cues will trigger voters to either rely on their awareness of the issue or political predispositions when they make up their minds of how to vote, depending on whether they are being exposed to one or two competing elite messages, and apply this model to explore whether this was the case in the Czech 2003 EU accession referendum. The paper concludes that Czech voters employed a range of proxies in the opinion formation process, and that assumptions that the elite dictated the public vote can be questioned.