From being an outsider (I have never even visited UK yet), it seems to me from talking to people and reading the news it was more a vote about "do you like how the things are now and where they are headed, or would you like ... something else"? Something else could have been not necessarily Brexit, as long as it was drastic enough change from the status quo.
And I think a good number of people are just dissatisfied and thought this gamble for a drastic change would perhaps improve things.
I think most people voting in the 2016 referendum were, in their minds, answering the question "do you want to give th establishment a good kicking?".
Doesn’t make sense to me. Seems analogous to getting fed up with shady mechanics, so the next time your car breaks down you drive it over a cliff in the hopes that the wreckage will be more reliable. But I guess people do strange things when they feel like they have no control.
Exactly. Desperate people who don't see anything in the future for them or see thing getting worse, don't usually act rationally. Poverty does that to people as well, for example, and that's visible daily. They resort to payday loans, food they buy might not be healthy for them in the long term and so on.
On the other side there are usually powerful forces willing to take advantage of that irrationality and desperation.
Now that they did, it's reasonable to have another referendum on those specific terms. To not do so would be undemocratic, in fact.
So even if there had been a pre exit agreement to be vote for in the Brexit one, it might ended the same. Leave or stay. And I’m not sure UK people would have read it (but I may be completely wrong by projecting how we did in France)
Opponents (on the left side of French politics) to the European Constitution argued that rejecting it would allow France to open negotiations for a more social leaning EU that didn't try to be only a giant free trade zone, but would also care about the well-being of its citizens (social net, minimum wage, etc.). We've seen where that went: there never was a Constitution B. No-one ever agreed to even try to write one. In short: just like for the Brexit, there never was any concrete plan behind the "no".
Ironically UK managed to duck out of most of the Lisbon treaty obligations (like the Charter of Fundamental Rights, judicial harmonisation and co-operation, etc.), while it would have been much harder -if not impossible- to do with the European Constitution... Had we (the French) voted "yes", we may have ended up with a Brexit 10 years before Brexit!
I think your conclusion is right. Having an agreement worked out first probably wouldn’t have changed much.