The political economy of Brexit: explaining the vote

ABSTRACT

The UK’s closely contested Brexit vote to leave the EU is expected to have a significant impact on the UK and EU. While calculating the impact of Brexit is difficult since the UK is still formally a member of the EU, understanding the vote is possible. Leading up to the referendum, public opinion was divided along demographic and economic lines. This article uses referendum results at the local government level to test whether national, racial, religious and economic factors actually influenced the vote. Results indicate that demographic variables played a role while economic variables did not.

KEYWORDS:

• Brexit
• referendum
• voting
• European Union

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• D72
• H77
• P16

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank Joshua Hall for helpful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ This article is also part of two broader literatures that explore the economic and social factors influencing national referenda (Streicher et al. 2016) as well as the outcome of EU-related referenda in other EU countries such as Sweden (Ahlfeldt, Maennig, and Osterheider 2016).

² http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/

³ There are 382 local government jurisdictions where vote results were tabulated. However, the Isles of Scilly and Northern Ireland are not included because of a lack of comparable census data, while Gibraltar is dropped since it is a British Overseas Territory geographically and culturally distinct from the UK.

⁴ https://www.ons.gov.uk/