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This introductory chapter provides an overview of the Withdrawal Agreement of the United Kingdom (UK) from the European Union (EU). The Withdrawal Agreement, adopted on the basis of Article 50 Treaty on European Union (TEU), spells out the terms and conditions of the UK departure from the EU, including ground-breaking solutions to deal with the thorniest issues which emerged in the context of the withdrawal negotiations. Admittedly, the Withdrawal Agreement is only a part of the Brexit deal. The Agreement, in fact, is accompanied by a connected political declaration, which outlines the framework of future EU–UK relations. The chapter then offers a chronological summary of the process that led to the adoption of the Withdrawal Agreement, describing the crucial stages in the Brexit process — from the negotiations to the conclusion of a draft agreement and its rejection, to the extension and the participation of the UK to European Parliament (EP) elections, to the change of UK government and the ensuing constitutional crisis, to the new negotiations with the conclusion of a revised agreement, new extension, and new UK elections eventually leading to the departure of the UK from the EU.

The voter is increasingly unpredictable and party identification is in decline. This chapter argues that voting decisions contribute to processes of de-alignment. By deciding whether to vote or to abstain, or whether to cast the vote sincerely or to defect from one’s “own” party, the individual voter contributes actively to the (in)stability of his/her party identification and, thus, as an aggregate pattern, to declining levels of partisanship in the electorate. Moreover, multilevel electoral systems introduce a different quality of elections. So-called second-order elections, which are perceived to be of lesser importance in comparison to the national first-order election, offer opportunities to abstain or vote differently at an apparently “low cost.” By not voting, or voting differently, however, older attachments fade away. We show that party defection in second-order elections is as consequential as party disloyalty in first-order elections. Therefore, multilevel voting is a significant force towards rising volatility and the decline of stable party identification.

The chapter examines first how many voters deviate from the party they are closest to in left‐right terms, but rather vote for a Eurosceptic party. In addition, the contestation of the European issue is regarded. As voters require information about the political agenda to make a decision, the chapter explores contestation effects by analysing the impact of news media reporting. Using public opinion and media data of the 1999, 2004, and 2009 European Election Studies, it finds that only a few voters deviate from their left‐right preferences and choose a Eurosceptic party. Moreover, the news media hardly exert an influence on changes in ideological vote deviations even when taking individuals’ pre‐held EU attitudes into account.

The media play an important role as a source of information during European Parliament elections. Generally speaking, there is a positive relationship between being exposed to news about the European Union, and in particular positive news, and pro‐EU attitudes. However, this influence of individual exposure to EU news is less strong in countries that have a lot of EU news anyway. Thus, a dampening effect of contextual EU news visibility is seen on the impact of individual exposure to EU news. While it may be an intended—and in part successful—consequence of EP elections to generate news, the impact of this coverage of EU attitudes is less straightforward.

The fifth enlargement of the European Union, projected to take place in 2004 at the time of writing, this chapter states will be unlike any other. In part this results from its sheer scale: there are, at the time this book published, thirteen candidate states, with twelve of which negotiations are in process, and the European Council has indicated that, ‘if the present rate of progress of the negotiations and reforms in the candidate States is maintained’, ten countries may be ready to accede in time to take part as Member States in the 2004 European Parliament elections. This chapter seeks to introduce a discussion of a number of specific features of this enlargement, in particular those features which are distinctive or which have a wider significance.