UK Referendum Research Articles

Brexit references in UK financial disclosure discourse (2015-2017): a corpus study

Major political events become a dominant topic of the discussions in the countries involved, and various actors, often other than political parties, take a stance towards them. The withdrawal of the UK from the European Union as a result of the 2016 UK referendum was one of those, and a quite polarised atmosphere from supporters of both sides was observed in the UK and the rest of Europe since the referendum was announced in 2015. Based on the impact of the Brexit on the economy, this study focused into the financial domain of the UK, and the ways that UK financial services referred towards it in their financial disclosures before, during and just after the referendum. For that purpose, I collected the 2015, 2016 and 2017 annual reports from five UK-based financial companies (Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, Royal Bank of Scotland and Santander UK), and I used thematic keywords to identify all the texts referring to the 2016 UK referendum, its outcome, and the response of the financial services to the exiting process of the UK from the European Union. This set of texts composed the Brexit-related data set, in which different analytical tasks were performed. I explored the context in which the thematic keywords are found, compared statistically the three yearly subsets of the corpus, and searched the significant words of the subset in terms of their keyness strength. This case study revealed that the discourse around a major political event such as Brexit cannot be considered as neutral or objective, and that financial companies clearly expressed negative opinion regarding the 2016 referendum and the UK’s decision to exit the European Union.

THE IMPACT OF BREXIT ON THE PEACE PROCESS IN NORTHERN IRELAND

The article analyzes Brexit as a factor influencing the Good Friday Agreement and the transformation of the peace process in Northern Ireland, as well as the relationship between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. It is argued that Brexit poses a threat to the security of Ireland and the EU, since it undermines the foundations of the peace process in Northern Ireland and creates the likelihood that the border will be closed on the island of Ireland again. The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 was based on the fact that both signatory states are members of the EU, and many of its provisions will not be implemented after Brexit. It has been proven that after Brexit, the most controversial issue was the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, which became the external border of the EU. The border, which was heavily militarized during the conflict, became virtually invisible after its settlement, and people and goods freely cross it. This became possible largely because both Ireland and the UK were part of the EU single market, a common set of rules that ensures the free movement of goods, services, people and finances within the bloc.It is argued that the new relationship between the EU and the UK, which was agreed during 2020 and implemented from January 2021, resulted in an attempt to resolve the complex border issue, which was carried out in the Northern Ireland Protocol. The arrangements of the Northern Ireland Protocol, according to which Northern Ireland, but not the rest of the UK, remains within the framework of the EU single market for goods, make it possible to maintain an open border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. The establishment of an open border was a key aspect of the Northern Ireland peace process and the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which ended the conflict in Northern Ireland. It is shown that the Northern Ireland Protocol creates a de facto customs border in the Irish Sea between Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom. Mainly to address the concerns of the DUP unionists about the Northern Ireland Protocol, in 2022-2023, the EU and the UK agreed on revised mechanisms for its operation – the Windsor Framework, which entered into force on March 24, 2023. The DUP refused to accept the Framework Program as meeting their interests until early 2024. Further adjustments to its work have not been agreed upon and the formation of a new Northern Ireland executive has not begun. It is proved that Brexit is becoming a new and significant factor in the unification of Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland. Brexit has put the issue of the unification of Ireland at the top of the political agenda of both parts of Ireland. The majority of Northern Irish residents voted to remain in the EU in the 2016 UK referendum. Unification would give Northern Ireland, where both British and Irish citizens live, full EU citizenship.

ChatGPT-4 as a journalist: Whose perspectives is it reproducing?

The rapid emergence of generative AI models in the media sector demands a critical examination of the narratives these models produce, particularly in relation to sensitive topics, such as politics, racism, immigration, public health, gender and violence, among others. The ease with which generative AI can produce narratives on sensitive topics raises concerns about potential harms, such as amplifying biases or spreading misinformation. Our study juxtaposes the content generated by a state-of-the-art generative AI, specifically ChatGPT-4, with actual articles from leading UK media outlets on the topic of immigration. Our specific case study focusses on the representation of Eastern European Roma migrants in the context of the 2016 UK Referendum on EU membership. Through a comparative critical discourse analysis, we uncover patterns of representation, inherent biases and potential discrepancies in representation between AI-generated narratives and mainstream media discourse with different political views. Preliminary findings suggest that ChatGPT-4 exhibits a remarkable degree of objectivity in its reporting and demonstrates heightened racial awareness in the content it produces. Moreover, it appears to consistently prioritise factual accuracy over sensationalism. All these features set it apart from right-wing media articles in our sample. This is further evidenced by the fact that, in most instances, ChatGPT-4 refrains from generating text or does so only after considerable adjustments when prompted with headlines that the model deems inflammatory. While these features can be attributed to the model’s diverse training data and model architecture, the findings invite further examination to determine the full scope of ChatGPT-4’s capabilities and its potential shortcomings in representing the full spectrum of social and political perspectives prevalent in society.

Reframing the Refugee: Jenny Erpenbeck’s Compassionate Politics

Countless polls, studies and surveys conducted prior to and following the 2016 UK Referendum on Membership of the European Union confirmed immigration to be the key emotive issue for not only the British electorate, but several Western European nations. By critiquing key pieces of EU legislation, Go, Went, Gone (2015) by Jenny Erpenbeck offers a humanising, caustic warning of the troubling politicisation of EU and non-EU migration in Germany, suggesting the ways by which literature can destabilise institutional optics of power and counteract myths surrounding the process of racial othering.

Cognitive ability and voting behaviour in the 2016 UK referendum on European Union membership.

On June 23rd 2016 the UK voted to leave the European Union. The period leading up to the referendum was characterized by a significant volume of misinformation and disinformation. Existing literature has established the importance of cognitive ability in processing and discounting (mis/dis) information in decision making. We use a dataset of couples within households from a nationally representative UK survey to investigate the relationship between cognitive ability and the propensity to vote Leave / Remain in the 2016 UK referendum on European Union membership. We find that a one standard deviation increase in cognitive ability, all else being equal, increases the likelihood of a Remain vote by 9.7%. Similarly, we find that an increase in partner's cognitive ability further increases the respondent's likelihood of a Remain vote (7.6%). In a final test, restricting our analysis to couples who voted in a conflicting manner, we find that having a cognitive ability advantage over one's partner increases the likelihood of voting Remain (10.9%). An important question then becomes how to improve individual and household decision making in the face of increasing amounts of (mis/dis) information.

Brexit and ‘Global Britain’: role adaptation and contestation in trade policy

AbstractBrexit has led to major changes in UK trade policy after decades of collective trade agreements and regulatory alignment with the European Union. Following the 2016 UK referendum on EU membership, the idea of ‘Global Britain’ was touted as the central goal in securing policy autonomy and regulatory independence with respect to trade, rooted in a strong sense of liberalization unencumbered by the perceived constraints of European membership. This article suggests that the UK’s role conception as a global trading (and finance) state has been revived by Brexit. Yet the performance of this role has been mixed. Role adaptation is far from complete, and evidence from the postreferendum period suggests that the post-Brexit economy has failed to fulfil the optimistic expectations of the those who favoured Brexit. In trade, the UK has been buffeted by the post-Brexit relationship with the EU and the changing demands of the global political economy.

Entitlement Racism on YouTube: White injury—the licence to Humiliate Roma migrants in the UK

Hate speech monitoring has become a challenging task for social media platforms. While efforts have been made to combat racism and other forms of hate speech, marginalised communities, such as the Roma are frequent targets of intense discrimination and online racist abuse. This article examines manifestations of Romaphobia, also known as anti-Roma racism, on YouTube in the context of 2016 UK Referendum on EU membership, when Roma along with other Eastern European migrants became demonized in the right-wing narratives of Brexit supporters. Drawing on Thematic Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis, the article provides an in-depth account of how Romaphobia is discursively constructed in the commentaries of those watching YouTube documentaries about Eastern European migrants. In addition to drawing attention to various forms of overt and covert racism that fly under the radar in the content moderation process, the analysis shows that ‘entitlement racism’ is gradually becoming normalised in social media, with anti-Roma racism acquiring alarming levels of verbal violence which needs immediate attention.

Expecting Brexit and UK migration: Should I go?

This paper examines the impact of the 2016 UK referendum and expecting Brexit on migration flows and net migration in the UK. We employ a Difference-in-Differences strategy and compare EU migration to non-EU migration before and immediately after the UK referendum of June 2016. We also investigate the potential secondary effects of the referendum on non-EU migrants by using different methodologies and various robustness checks. Our results show that after the referendum (i) migration inflows from the EU declined, (ii) emigration of EU migrants increased and (iii) net migration flows from EU countries to the UK fell. Our results are not driven by the potential spillover impacts on non-EU migrant workers. Overall, the findings show that migration in the UK declined after the Brexit referendum, even before any policy change.

Drivers of Consensus: Responses to Brexit in Germany, France, Ireland and Poland

ABSTRACT Brexit was potentially a highly divisive issue for the EU27 with states having different relationships with the UK. And yet in the period from the UK's referendum in 2016 until the exit of the UK in 2020, the EU27 maintained a remarkable degree of unity. This article examines relative EU27 unity in the face of the Brexit process. The article is based on interviews and other research on four selected EU member states: Germany, France, Poland and Ireland. The article considers four different factors drawn from the theoretical literature that might account for EU27 unity and then examines how they played out in each of the four states. We then compare across the cases and conclude that they all shaped national responses to Brexit, but that how they mattered and the patterns of effects were differentiated among the cases. This points towards the importance of seeing Brexit as a multifaceted phenomenon.

An analysis of the anti-immigration discourse during the official 2016 Brexit referendum campaign

During the 2016 UK referendum on EU membership, most political and media actors highly debated the issue of the regulation of European immigration in the United Kingdom. The political salience of this issue led to attitudinal changes in public opinion regarding the European Union and its institutions. Brexiteers shaped the discourse on European immigration to influence how people chose to vote in the EU referendum. Their anti-immigration discourse had indeed a significant role in shaping beliefs among the public and, hence, in voters’ support for Brexit vote. This paper will assess the role of the Leavers’ rhetorical strategy, which consisted in portraying European immigrants as a threat to the British national community. Using official government speeches, parliamentary debates, press conferences, election manifestos, media interviews, social media and newspaper articles, the following paper will aim to highlight the discursive strategies of the prominent campaigners participating in the referendum debate. Analysing the hostile immigration stance through Critical Discourse Analysis, this article will examine how the Leavers’ anti-immigration discourse mobilised Welfare nationalistic values and beliefs to legitimise the referendum’s outcome.

Identity, immigration, and subjective well-being: why are natives so sharply divided on immigration issues?

Abstract We put forward differences in the form of national identity across natives as a key mechanism explaining the sharp public divide on immigration issues. We show that inflows of migrants into local areas can be harmful for the self-reported well-being of natives, but this is only true for natives who self-identify with an ethnic form of national identity. On the other hand, we provide some evidence to suggest that immigration may be utility enhancing for natives with a civic form of national identity. We also show how differences in national identity significantly predict voting preferences in the UK referendum on European Union membership where concern with immigration issues were a salient factor. Drawing on identity economics, our proposed explanation is that for natives with an ethnic form of national identity, any positive economic benefits associated with immigration may not be enough to outweigh losses in identity-based utility.

Evaluate the Post-Brexit Trade Performance under the Comparison Analysis between Britain and France in the Context of COVID-19

With the result of the UK referendum indicating that the UK agrees to leave the EU, the trade situation has changed a lot, especially in the duration of Covid-19. This paper employs the export and import data of France and Britain between 2019 to 2021. The results show that both France and Britain suffer a deep decline in trade value in 2020 due to the disadvantages brought by the outbreak of Covid-19. Also, the trade value recovers in 2021. his paper concluded that Britain lose more than France to its’ loss of EU membership, including the attractiveness reduction of foreign direct investment (FDI), raising the cost of trade transportation and fewer voices in the European Court of Justice.

Detecting political event risk in the option market

This study shows that the option market can ex ante detect and quantify the effects of political event risk. Focussing on the 2016 UK referendum on EU membership, we find that the Risk-Neutral Distribution extracted from GBPUSD futures options whose expiry spans the referendum date becomes bimodal and the Implied Volatility curve exhibits an unusual W-shape. To the contrary, the corresponding effects for FTSE100 are found to be very limited. The large swings in expectations regarding the event outcome during the referendum night allow us to observe the counterfactual and validate the ex ante information revealed in the option market.

Brexit: What Role did Process Play?

AbstractThe outcome of the UK referendum on 23 June 2016 was a major political event in the history of European integration. A member state voted for exit over voice and was on a journey to third country status. The objective of this article is twofold. First, it analyses the EU’s response to Brexit, including the role of process, up to the departure of the UK from the Union on 31 January 2020. Second, it explains why the EU adopted the approach that it did. The analytical lens builds on Kooiman's three governing orders, all of which were deployed in managing Brexit.

The 2016 UK referendum on EU membership and the importance of remaining on point during the campaign

The 2016 UK referendum on EU membership and the importance of remaining on point during the campaign

Can citizens guess how other citizens voted based on demographic characteristics?

AbstractHow well do citizens understand the associations between social groups and political divisions in their societies? Previous research has indicated systematic biases in how the demographic composition of party supporters are perceived, but this need not imply that citizens misperceive the likely voting behavior of specific individuals. We report results from two experiments where subjects were provided with randomly selected demographic profiles of respondents to the 2017 British Election Study (BES) and then asked to assess either (1) which party that individual was likely to have voted for in the 2017 UK election or (2) whether that individual was likely to have voted Leave or Remain in the 2016 UK referendum on EU membership. We find that, despite substantial overconfidence in individual responses, on average citizens’ guesses broadly reflect the actual distribution of groups supporting the parties and referendum positions.

The Economic Origins of Authoritarian Values: Evidence From Local Trade Shocks in the United Kingdom

What explains the backlash against the liberal international order? Are its causes economic or cultural? We argue that while cultural values are central to understanding the backlash, those values are, in part, endogenous and shaped by long-run economic change. Using an original survey of the British population, we show that individuals living in regions where the local labor market was more substantially affected by imports from China have significantly more authoritarian values and that this relationship is driven by the effect of economic change on authoritarian aggression. This result is consistent with a frustration-aggression mechanism by which large economic shocks hinder individuals’ expected attainment of their goals. This study provides a theoretical mechanism that helps to account for the opinions and behaviors of Leave voters in the 2016 UK referendum who in seeking the authoritarian values of order and conformity desired to reduce immigration and “take back control” of policymaking.

From Black Wednesday to Brexit: Macroeconomic shocks and correlations of equity returns in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom

AbstractThis paper investigates whether macroeconomic shocks, such as the UK's referendum decision to leave the European Union (“Brexit”), the 2008 Financial Crisis, the 1992 ERM Crisis (“Black Wednesday”), and the 1987 stock market crash (“Black Monday”), had a positive impact on portfolio risk diversification. We estimate weekly dynamic conditional correlations and then optimal sectoral portfolio allocations between 1973 and 2019. Our results show that correlations of equity returns increased as a consequence of economic integration among European countries from the mid‐1980s until the late 2000s, and decreased in the United Kingdom after Black Wednesday and the Brexit referendum. We tested the existence of a correlation change‐point on June 27, 2016 by applying Wied et al. (2012)'s [Econometric Theory, 28(3), 570–589] correlation structural break test, which we modified to account for dynamic conditional correlations. Application of this test confirms that the referendum date was a break‐point in nearly all UK manufacturing industries. The failure of Lehman Brothers and the 1987 stock market crash were also identified as structural breaks in equity correlations. Moreover, our findings suggest that the Brexit vote may constitute a long‐term trend reversal of the convergence of equity return correlations in European markets, akin to Black Wednesday, rather than a shock like the 1987 and 2008 financial crises, which merely intensified a historical upward trend in correlations of European equity returns.

Brexit and Territorial Preferences: Evidence from Scotland and Northern Ireland

AbstractHas the UK referendum to leave the EU (Brexit) affected territorial preferences within the UK? We draw on comparative theories of such preferences to address this question, as Brexit can be seen as a shock to a political unit. We test hypotheses in two key regions, Scotland and Northern Ireland, with original surveys fielded at a unique time (September 2019). We randomize making salient different Brexit scenarios and measure support for Scottish independence and unification with Ireland within each region. We find in Scotland the prospect of leaving the EU increases support for independence. This effect is pronounced among those who support the UK remaining in the EU. In Northern Ireland, religious background correlates highly with territorial views, and we find little evidence of Brexit or border-scenario effects. Our results contribute to the literature on decentralization processes and the EU, and provide evidence of when negative shocks affect such preferences.

Labour's post‐Brexit electoral strategy

Labour's <scp>post‐Brexit</scp> electoral strategy