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Lessons Learned, Lessons Forgotten: The Swedish Referendum on EMU of September 20031

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Nicholas Aylott
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Abstract

Sweden's referendum on whether to join EMU produced an emphatic No. The murder of one of the Yes side's leading representatives thus appeared not to have affected the result. Cleavages exposed in the referendum on EU membership nine years previously were even more apparent this time; yet No-voters were also to found across the political, regional and social spectrums. As well as describing the campaign and explaining the outcome, this article focuses on the campaign strategies adopted by parties and other actors. Lessons from previous campaigns had been learned by the opponents of EMU, but largely forgotten by its supporters.

Type
Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 40 , Issue 4 , 2005 , pp. 540 - 564
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2005.

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Footnotes

1

Thanks for helpful comments on an earlier draft go to Karim Zendegani and to two anonymous reviewers. Thanks, too, to Jessika Wide and Svante Ersson for their help with the map in Figure 2. Responsibility for the article's contents and for all translations from Swedish are, however, mine alone. Because many of the newspaper reports cited were taken from the organs’ websites, dates may sometimes be a day earlier than those on which the reports appeared in hard copy.

References

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