Leave Vote Research Articles

Social Networks and Brexit: Evidence from a Trade Shock

Regional exposure to Chinese import competition has often been linked to support for the Leave option in the 2016 UK EU membership referendum. Looking at 143 harmonised International Territorial Level 3 (ITL3) regions covering England and Wales, and using data on the density of online social ties between them, I show that regional support for leaving the EU was also associated with exposure in socially connected regions. I first delineate 18 commuting zones based on interregional flows over three Census years. For each region, I then construct a measure of own exposure to Chinese import competition and a measure of exposure in a set of social neighbours located outside its commuting zone. Exploiting variation within commuting zones, and using an instrumental variable approach, I find that the two measures have comparable positive effects on the regional share of the Leave vote. In a series of checks, I do not find evidence that the effect of social neighbours’ exposure is driven by an economic channel or a relationship between import competition and social ties. I also corroborate the regional results using survey data on vote choice. I interpret these findings as indicative of social spillovers between local labour markets: information flows from social neighbours are a likely channel behind the estimated spillover effects on voting outcomes.

Brexit – the EU membership crisis that wasn’t?

This introduction to the special issue recalls the alarm raised in EU capitals and Brussels after the UK’s in-out referendum delivered a Leave vote in June 2016. The fear was of a domino effect and the further fragmentation of an already divided EU. Seven years later, it is clear that there was rapid attrition of Eurosceptic triumphalism, and the EU-27 showed remarkable unity. This required a sustained collective effort to contain a membership crisis and maintain the EU polity. Yet, the issue contributors challenge the notion that the alarm was unfounded and explain why this counter-factual did not materialise, even though potential for future membership crises of different sorts was revealed. Theoretically, this supports an understanding of the EU as a polity that is fragile, yet able to assert porous borders, exercise authority over a diverse membership, and mobilise a modicum of loyalty when the entire integration regime is under threat.

Behavioural entropy as an individual difference

Introduction & BackgroundThe availability of digital footprints data have provided new and invaluable opportunities for personality psychologists. One way to study individual differences with digital footprints data is through the lens of entropy, which is a measure of the degree of randomness of a probabilistic system. When applied to individual behaviour, entropy captures how predictable an individual’s (e.g., shopping) pattern of behaviour is over time. In this study, we proposed that entropy can be conceptualised as a proxy measure of Openness, a Big Five personality trait. We further studied entropy’s associations with external behavioural outcome, namely the voting outcomes of the 2016 EU ‘Brexit’ referendum in the UK. This referendum asked UK citizens whether the UK should stay in the EU (vote Remain) or leave the EU (vote Leave). It has been demonstrated that Leave (or ‘Brexit’) vote was heavily influenced by attitudes towards immigration which is associated with values of being less ‘open’ to other cultures, and therefore we expected that entropy – or tendency to try new things – would be associated positively with voting Remain. Objectives & ApproachWith a massive data set (20,550,952 customers) provided by a large UK retail chain over a period of 2 years, we computed aggregated entropy for the Local Authority Districts (LADs). Further we investigated the relationships between entropy and personality traits, as well as between entropy and the referendum outcomes, at geographically aggregated levels. Relevance to Digital FootprintsThis study brought together digital footprints data with external sources. This study also identified population level insights by examining personality traits and their utility in predicting sociopolitical outcomes. ResultsResults of a linear regression model showed strong evidence supporting a positive relationship between entropy and Openness (b = 0.30, t = 3.30, p = .001), and a negative relationship between entropy and Neuroticism (b = -0.48, t = -3.53, p < .001). Further, entropy was associated with outcomes of the EU referendum in each LAD. Results of another linear regression model showed strong evidence supporting a positive relationship between the percentage of Remain votes and entropy (b = 0.28, t = 4.80, p < .001). Conclusions & ImplicationsThe relationship between Big Five trait Openness and entropy provided support that personality can be inferred from digital footprints data such as shopping history records. The positive relationship between entropy and the proportion of Remain vote demonstrated that people who are more open to new experiences voted Remain. Our findings have broader implications showing that it is possible to find associations between personality traits extrapolated from shopping data and real-world choices.

Delayed shock? How Brexit conditioned campaign effects in British general elections

The impact of campaigns on electoral performance is conditioned in part by contextual effects. The popularity equilibrium model has proven to be an important guide to how the electoral effects of local campaigns vary by a party’s existing level of popularity. Such an equilibrium can, however be disturbed by an electoral shock—a rare event which fundamentally challenges the foundations that underpin predictability in elections. This article analyses the impact of the electoral shock of the UK’s 2016 referendum on EU membership on campaign effects in the subsequent elections of 2017 and 2019. Using a novel theoretical and methodological approach, it shows that while there were observable effects of the Leave vote already present before the referendum, the geography of the effectiveness of Labour and Conservative local campaigns was altered after the referendum. However, it was not until the 2019 election that the shock of the 2016 Leave vote became a particularly important predictor of the electoral efficacy of both parties’ campaigns.

Private Equity Buyouts and Exports: The Impact of Brexit on UK Firms

AbstractThis paper examines how private equity (PE) buyouts affect export activity among target firms around the Brexit period. Using data on UK firms for 2012–2019 and difference‐in‐differences estimations for matched target versus non‐target firms, we assess how the unprecedented Leave vote affects portfolio firms' internationalization. We find that following the referendum, PE buyout targets are more likely to engage in exporting and are in turn more likely to increase the value of their exports and their export intensity relative to their non‐PE‐backed peers. We further find evidence of an active governance channel, whereby the benefits of PE investment after Brexit are more potent when greater governance changes occur on boards of directors, and for firms whose senior directors have more international experience.

Racialisation, the EU Referendum result and sentiments of belonging in the UK: a consideration of Roma populations

ABSTRACT This article reports on a qualitative study with migrant Roma communities in South Yorkshire, UK. The study was undertaken shortly after the 2016 European Union membership referendum in the UK. It finds that while hostility towards the studied Roma population did increase immediately after the resulting Leave vote, their experiences of racialisation can be situated more clearly in how the result engendered a shift in the expressions and understandings of their own place and position, with their particular histories as EU migrants of Roma heritage. In doing so, it adds to the evidence of how racialisation is manifest for such groups within this period. While acknowledging the specificity of these experiences, the article also argues that Roma share some features with the experiences of other EU migrants, also situated in the Leave period of social, cultural and geopolitical uncertainty.

The past, Brexit, and the future in Northern Ireland: a quasi-experiment

ABSTRACT The UK’s decision to leave the European Union has raised questions about whether Brexit might bring “the Troubles” back to Northern Ireland. We exploit the timing of a unique survey to examine how the EU referendum campaign and its outcome shaped perceptions about the past conflict and preferences for the future in Northern Ireland. The survey reveals that, after the Leave vote, people were more likely to perceive the partitioning of the Island of Ireland and illegitimate rule of Westminster as important conflict causes. Respondents surveyed after the referendum were also more likely to see reunification with Ireland as desirable, and changes in conflict perceptions contributed to this change in preferences for the future. At the same time, public responses seem to be the result of a gradual change during the campaign rather than a shock effect to the outcome, and effects decay quickly. These findings contribute to a better understanding of the micro-foundations driving post-Brexit public opinion in Northern Ireland and the potential consequences of holding contentious referendums more generally.

Credit positive or negative? Credit rating agencies’ framing of Brexit’s implications for the Republic of Ireland, the United Kingdom, the EU, and the Northern Ireland peace process

ABSTRACT Among Brexit’s implications was its potential to destabilise the Northern Ireland peace process, cast doubt on the future status of the Irish border, and weaken the constitutional integrity of both the UK and the EU. A less publicly visible aspect of Brexit, however, was the weight such implications carried in how international credit rating agencies evaluated the creditworthiness of the EU, the UK, and the other state most affected by the Leave vote, the Republic of Ireland (ROI). A frames analysis of the agencies’ discourse during the withdrawal period, from 2016 to 2020, suggested that their privileging of market perspectives had the effect of shaping but also of limiting their engagement with Brexit’s socio-cultural, identity and political implications for the border and the peace process. In particular, the agencies drew weak discursive links between Brexit as an instance of EU disintegration and its implications for the peace process and for the ROI’s shifting geopolitical relations as a continuing member state. This was further reflected in the agencies’ tendency to underplay socio-cultural, identity and political implications in their discourse on potential future processes of UK and EU disintegration.

Resilience in the City of London: the fate of UK financial services after Brexit

ABSTRACT The fate of British finance following the Brexit referendum revolves around the ‘resilience or relocation’ debate: will the City of London continue to thrive as the world’s leading financial centre or will the bulk of its activity move to rival hubs after departure from EU trading arrangements? Despite extensive commentary, there remains no systematic analysis of this question since the Leave vote. This paper addresses that lacuna by evaluating the empirical evidence concerning jobs, investments, and share of key trading markets. Contrary to widely-held expectations, the evidence suggests that the City has been remarkably resilient. Brexit has had no significant impact on jobs and London has consolidated its position as the chief location for financial FDI, FinTech funding, and attracting new firms. Most unexpectedly, the City has increased its dominance in major infrastructure markets such as over-the-counter clearing of (euro-denominated) derivatives and foreign exchange—although it has lost out in the handling of repurchase agreements and share trading. Based upon this evidence, the paper argues that London’s resilience is mainly a function of its status as a crucial ‘agglomeration peak’ of global finance which shelters its unique ecosystem from the typical pressures of capital flight.

From ‘Brexhaustion’ to ‘Covidiots’: the UK United Kingdom and the Populist Future

Boris Johnson’s electoral victory and the 2020 culmination of Brexit are accelerating Britain’s shift towards the right and towards open criticism of technocracy in the UK and EU. Since 2016 the UK’s political atmosphere has polarised into hostile extremes. The continuation of this toxicity beyond Brexit, the dominance of nationalist narratives as Britain’s new ‘politics of everything’ (Valluvan 2019). While the Conservative Party remains traditionally centre-right and the Brexit Party has ceased to be relevant, the UK continues to witness the growth of the far right and what is called here the ‘Radical Right’, which have been accelerating since 2016, rapidly gaining influence (Norris and Inglehart 2019: 443-472), and ‘mainstreaming’ (Miller-Idriss 2017) in the Conservative majority elected in December 2019. The past four years have seen growing British contempt for technocracy in London and Brussels, while the Leave vote has been represented as a “Will of the People” antithetical to a Remain/Revoke/Second Referendum position, often portrayed as an anti-democratic scheme by “the elite” to frustrate the will of “the people”. This ‘us and them’ populist narrative is deepening as the UK’s volatile political environment moves away from the political procedures and economic values by which the UK has operated since 1945. Since early 2020, this narrative has been significantly accelerated by Covid-19 countermeasures, with anti-EU parties and narratives on the left and right becoming anti-lockdown or anti-vaccine parties and narratives. This paper approaches the radical right as emblematic of British politics’ shift from centrism towards polarised factions defined not by party but by support or contempt for technical governance. In this paper we propose a new explanatory basis for studying the populist radical right not as a temporary phenomenon in response to specific political events and conditions, but as a fluid, amorphous, and heterogeneous set of groups, parties, and narratives whose strategies, appeal, and narratives make them extremely adaptable, and significant as a force with substantial influence of politics into the future.

The deep story of Leave voters affective assemblages: implications for political decentralisation in the UK

How do British Pluralist traditions need to be re-imagined to address the issues at the heart of the Brexit vote? This paper will use qualitative research about why Britain voted for Brexit to examine this question. The paper interrogates the question that we require a more decentred local government at a community level in order for people to feel both represented, and able to participate. Firstly, it will analyse the values, attitudes and beliefs of Leave voters who participated in the study, and situate them in terms of the affective assemblages of symbolic meaning, ideas, beliefs, values and emotion through which they imagined themselves and their community. It will examine the ‘deep story’ (Boler and Davis, in Emotion Space Soc 27:75–85, 2018) through which participants affective responses are situated into inherited historical cultures and traditions, exploring where participants located themselves in relation to others and their particular cultures and traditions. In the final part of the paper, I consider what this means for British pluralist traditions at a local and community level in a post-Brexit polity. I find that the Leave vote signals and symbolises a turn to the traditional Nation State as the political space that can protect and care for individuals who long for control over their worlds. This is potentially at odds with their expressed desire stronger democratic engagement.

“so this is not a game” - Brexit as a ‘situation of uncommon precarity’ for migrants of Roma heritage in the UK

The vulnerability of migrants of Roma heritage[1] to insecure, low status, (and sometimes exploitative), employment conditions in the UK has been highlighted by various studies (e.g. Poole & Adamson 2008;, Martin et al 2017, Tileaga et al. 2019). Such patterns of employment have frequently been identified as ‘precarious labour’ across the European Union (e.g. Apostolova et al 2014; Vincze, 2015).Following the 2016 Referendum vote to leave the EU[2], the UK government indicated that providing evidence of consistent, regular working histories would form the basis of applications by EU migrants seeking to remain in the country long-term. (Home Office, 2018, 2020). In doing so, it made evidence of legal, paid employment central to future legitimacy in the country, but those struggling to produce such information face potentially precarious futures (Migration Observatory, 2018). Studies have suggested that, given the specific disadvantages faced by Roma migrants in the UK, the aftermath of ‘Brexit’[3] posed enhanced risks an intensification of the precarity they already experienced.Drawing on interviews conducted in two different locations in 2019, this paper adds experiential detail to their specific experiences of precarious work, located in the ‘no man’s land’ between the 2016 vote and final departure, due at the end of 2020. It assesses the implications for their continued residence, with particular reference to the status of EU migrants post Brexit and the proposed requirements for remaining in the UK. However, it argues that for Roma in the UK, Brexit represents a contemporary, but expanded example of labour precarity, encompassing not only work, but family and future, hopes and aspirations.[1] ‘Migrants of Roma heritage’ is used to recognise the diversity (national, cultural, educational, and linguistic among others) present across the communities who identify as Roma and to avoid the ethnicity based essentialising criticised by many scholars.[2] The 2016 Referendum on EU membership offered UK voters a single question ‘Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union? The 51.6% majority who chose to leave are colloquially referred to as the ‘Leave Vote’, and the process of leaving as ‘Brexit’ [Britain/British-exit][3] ‘Brexit’ is here used to denote the process from the Referendum campaign, through the negotiations, towards final departure.

Voting for Your Pocketbook, but against Your Pocketbook? A Study of Brexit at the Local Level

In explaining the outcome of the 2016 EU referendum in the United Kingdom, can theories emphasizing the importance of economic factors be reconciled with the fact that many people appeared to vote against their economic self-interest? This article approaches this puzzle through case study research that draws on fieldwork and a process of reciprocal knowledge exchange with local communities in five local authorities in England and Wales. It argues that the Leave vote can be attributed partly to political discontent associated with trajectories of relative economic decline and deindustrialization. Building on the growing literature about the role of narratives and discourses in navigating uncertainty, it contends that these localized economic experiences, interpreted through local-level narratives, paved the way for local-level discourses of resilience and nationwide optimistic messaging about the economic impacts of Brexit to resonate. Local and national-level discourses discounting the potential economic costs of leaving the European Union played a crucial role in giving precise, somewhat paradoxical, political content to the sense of discontent. The article contributes to the growing focus on place and community in understanding political behavior and invites further research on local discourses linking macro-level trajectories and micro-level voting decisions.

Review

Review

Brexit and Empire: ‘Global Britain’ and the Myth of Imperial Nostalgia

ABSTRACT In the wake of the 2016 referendum, the idea that ‘imperial nostalgia’ motivated the Leave vote became a staple of academic commentary. Yet such claims suffer from four important flaws. They are usually polemical in character; they suggest, at least implicitly, that only Leave voters are subject to imperial patterns of thought; they fail to differentiate between Commonwealth and imperial loyalties; and they conflate ‘nostalgia’ with ‘amnesia’. This article deploys a longer historical perspective to offer a new reading of the relationship between Brexit and Empire, focusing on the ways in which empire is remembered and articulated. It shows how imperial modes of thought shaped the views of pro-Europeans, as well as their opponents, and explores the changing uses of the Commonwealth. It pays particular attention to the views of Black and Asian voters – a cohort that disrupts many conventional assumptions about Brexit – and shows how empire was excised from histories of ‘Global Britain’, in a manner that minimises the significance of decolonisation. As such, it presents the legacies of empire, not as a disorder to which only half the population is subject, but as a common cultural inheritance through which all sides of the European debate think and argue.

‘It aye like London, you know’: The Brexit Novel and the Cultural Politics of Devolution

This paper takes Anthony Cartwright’s The Cut (2017) as its central focus, a novel commissioned by European publisher Peirene Press as a fictional response to the UK’s 2016 Brexit vote. I provide a discussion of what I term the ‘cultural politics of devolution’ in Cartwright’s text, suggesting that it offers a critique of the British centralised state form and makes demands for the decentralisation of political power. Focussed on a small deindustrialised town, The Cut is an English regional polemic exploring how uneven development played a decisive role in the outcome of the European Union referendum. Building on Doreen Massey’s insight that places are not simply physical locations but ‘articulations of social relations’ (Massey, 1994: 22), my discussion of Cartwright’s novel is concerned with the way a discursive, cultural version of ‘the North’ was mobilised ideologically as a fulcrum of the Leave vote within Brexit media and political discourse. I trace the ways in which The Cut responds to this manoeuvre in an ambivalent deployment of nostalgia as both a vehicle for regional devolution and a literary mode associated with a parochial version of ‘the North’ that continues to exist in the national imagination. As this paper demonstrates, the text equivocates between a radical nostalgia that highlights the need for constitutional reform and a reactionary turn to the industrial past. Ultimately, I propose that The Cut forecloses its own devolutionary potential in an aesthetic and thematic reliance on cultural stereotypes of Northernness, suggesting the limitations of nostalgia as a resource for constructing alternatives to the present.

Explaining support for Brexit among parliamentary candidates: the case of Wales

The 2016 EU referendum was a key moment in the history of the United Kingdom. It has changed the course of the country and continues to shape political competition in the UK. Despite research on which voters cast their ballot for Leave having become a minor industry in recent years, we still know little about what factors motivated our politicians to do so. Using original data from the 2016 Welsh Candidate Study, this article explains support for Brexit among parliamentary candidates in Wales. It finds that both candidates’ socio-economic profile and political attitudes influenced their decision to vote Leave in 2016. The strongest determinants of Leave vote were candidates’ views on how the EU works; how democratic it is and how much influence it can exert. Candidates’ occupational background and policy concerns were also relevant, but their effects were slightly weaker. These findings not only highlight that there are important similarities between what influenced politicians and voters to cast their ballot for Leave, but also some salient differences.

Voting with their money: Brexit and outward investment by UK firms

We study the impact of the 2016 Brexit referendum on UK foreign direct investment. Using the synthetic control method to construct appropriate counterfactuals, we show that by March 2019 the Leave vote had led to a 17% increase in the number of UK outward investment transactions in the remaining EU27 member states, whereas transactions in non-EU OECD countries were unaffected. These results support the hypothesis that UK companies have been setting up European subsidiaries to retain access to the EU market after Brexit. At the same time, we find that the number of EU27 investment projects in the UK has declined by around 9%, illustrating that being a smaller economy than the EU leaves the UK more exposed to the costs of economic disintegration.

Turning out to turn down the EU: the mobilisation of occasional voters and Brexit

ABSTRACT Large amounts of occasional voters participated in the Brexit referendum. Did the increase in turnout affect the referendum outcome? For an answer, we exploit exogenous variation in voting costs, as large amounts of rainfall made voting more inconvenient in some areas. With an instrumental variable approach, we show that citizens whose voting benefits just surpassed costs under normal circumstances predominantly supported Leave. Hence, the turnout increase likely led to a larger Leave vote share. Exploring the reason for this with survey data, we show that Leave support was not generally higher in the population of low-propensity voters. Rather, the mobilisation of Leave-leaning, compared to Remain-leaning occasional voters was lopsided: The former were more likely to turn out. Our research highlights that the issue-specific mobilisation of low-propensity voters helps to explain electoral outcomes. This is particularly so in referendums with weak partisan preferences, and where single issues dominate voter decision making.

Educational attainment and the Brexit vote

The Brexit vote is the most significant political event in recent British history. We present bivariate choropleth maps comparing the Leave vote share with age-adjusted secondary educational attainment. This provides an immediate visual representation of the spatial and bivariate correlations between these variables, as well as their geographical distribution. Only 12 of the 85 local authorities that voted Remain had lower than expected age-adjusted educational attainment; only 10 of the 95 local authorities in which the Leave vote share exceeded 60% had higher than expected age-adjusted educational attainment. While the effectiveness of choropleth maps for exploring the spatial characteristics of bivariate relationships has been discussed by a number of authors, our technique of using borders to highlight a threshold value appears to be under-utilised.