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Despite years of crisis, the euro has enjoyed strong popular support across the Eurozone periphery. In light of the high costs of internal devaluation strategies, this begs the question why the public has remained in favor of the common currency. In this article, we propose a theoretical mechanism that accounts for both voters’ pocketbook preferences and their sociotropic assessments over the noisy trade-offs associated with the outcomes of euro membership and euro exit. Using original survey data from three consecutive survey waves in Greece (conducted in July, September, and December 2015, respectively), we analyze the attitudes of Greek voters toward the euro in an environment of acute uncertainty, austerity, high unemployment, and economic recession. First, we juxtapose our uncertainty mechanism of popular euro attitudes against other explanations put forward in the literature and find strong support for our argument. Second, we conduct a survey experiment to tap into attitudes toward the euro-austerity trade-off and find that as uncertainty over policy outcomes diminishes, framing effects abate in significance, especially among those who voted No in the July 2015 referendum. Finally, we derive distinct sets of euro preferences for different ‘vulnerability profiles’. Over time, as the trade-offs of euro membership become more pronounced, we find a marked fall in euro support between July and December 2015.

Referenda in Greece and the UK have recently sent shockwaves across Europe. This paper examines this popular challenge to international cooperation in a systematic fashion by focusing on foreign policy referenda in which a non-cooperative vote is associated with large negative externalities. Such high-stakes referenda are unusual because the consequences of a non-cooperative referendum outcome cannot be controlled by the national government but instead depend on whether the other countries accommodate or penalize the non-cooperative vote. This implies that voters’ expectations about the likely reaction abroad will be highly influential for voting behavior. Foreign policymakers can influence these expectations by sending costly signals ahead of the vote, thus trying to sway the vote in favor of cooperation. Using original survey data from a recent high-stakes referendum, the 2015 Greek referendum, we show that expectations about the consequences of a non-cooperative vote had a powerful effect on voting behavior. Leveraging the bank closure in Greece, we also show that costly signals sent by the other member states made voters more pessimistic about the consequences of a no-vote and increased the share of cooperative votes.