Who Gets What: The Economy, Relative Gains and Brexit

Jane Green,Timothy Hellwig,Edward Fieldhouse

doi:10.1017/s0007123420000551

Abstract

AbstractThere has been a lively debate about the economic and cultural-based drivers of support for populism. This article argues that economic concerns matter, but that they are realized through the relative gains and losses of social groups. Using new survey items in a large representative survey administered in Britain, it shows that citizens' economic assessments of the ethnic minority out-group – in relation to the group's situation 12 months ago and to assessments of the economic conditions of the white British in-group – are a predictor of support for Brexit. The results, which are robust to prior referendum vote, immigration attitudes and cultural sentiment, extend across income groups and national identity strength. Extending the analysis to a comparison of geographic in- and out-groups between local communities and London lends additional support to the argument. The implications of relative group-based economics are important for understanding Brexit and the economic sources of support for populism more broadly.

Highlights

Is support for Donald Trump, Britain’s exit from the EU (Brexit), and other populist parties and movements driven by economic grievances, or are these votes the result of concerns about the nature and pace of cultural change? How can we bridge the gap between research that finds a strong association between local economic performance and aggregated support for populism, but stronger individual-level evidence of the effects of concerns related to immigration? These questions are central to understanding recent political developments in Britain and the United States, and the rise of populist movements and parties in Western Europe and further afield
Including 2016 European Union (EU) referendum vote controls for the possibility that preferences about Brexit – and corresponding beliefs about the group-based economic outcomes of Brexit – lead to perceptions of group-based gains and losses.9. If this endogeneity were to exist, and for any bias to lead to findings that could explain our hypothesized expectations, Leave voters would need to believe that ethnic minorities were doing better and white British worse as a result of Brexit, whereas we suggest that the reverse should be the case
The literature has been divided about the relative explanatory power of an economic vs. cultural basis for the widespread rise of populism

Summary

Introduction

Is support for Donald Trump, Brexit, and other populist parties and movements driven by economic grievances, or are these votes the result of concerns about the nature and pace of cultural change? How can we bridge the gap between research that finds a strong association between local economic performance and aggregated support for populism, but stronger individual-level evidence of the effects of concerns related to immigration? These questions are central to understanding recent political developments in Britain and the United States, and the rise of populist movements and parties in Western Europe and further afield. This study offers a way to bridge existing explanations for Trump voting and Brexit voting that correlates geographically with various economic indicators (for example, Adler and Ansell 2020; Colantone and Stanig 2018; Fetzer 2019), but typically exhibits a stronger relationship at the individual level with concerns about immigration (Clarke, Goodwin and Whiteley 2017; Donovan and Redlawsk 2018; Goodwin and Milazzo 2017; Hobolt 2016; Iakhnis et al 2018; Kaufmann 2016; Mutz 2018; Norris and Inglehart 2018; Schaffner, MacWilliams and Nteta 2018) It moves us beyond an overly simplistic divide between the economy and immigration concerns as independent explanations, and beyond a variable race approach to assessing economic and cultural explanations. It helps to build bridges across perspectives in the wider populism literature and foster better crossdisciplinary understanding

Methods

Findings

Conclusion