Brexit was decided through which type of vote?

On Thursday 23 June 2016 the British electorate voted to leave the European Union with a vote of 52% to 48%. Just over nine months later, on 29 March 2017, Prime Minister Theresa May triggered Article 50, marking the start of two years of negotiations to thrash out Britain’s deal for its exit from the EU. 

Much has been said about how and why this ‘shock’ result came to pass. Now, Brexit: Why Britain voted to leave the European Union, co-authored by Professor Paul Whiteley from the Department of Government, uses over 10 years’ worth of survey data, a pre and post referendum panel survey and a unique survey of UKIP members to drill down into the real factors behind the vote and to examine its long-term consequences.

It’s being billed as the first comprehensive and objective study of the referendum.

This was underlined by former BBC journalist, political commentator and former president of YouGov Peter Kellner, who said: “Do not read 'Brexit’ – unless you want truth rather than propaganda, objectivity rather than bias, and evidence rather than prejudice.” 

Read the review of the book in The Economist and visit The Conversation to read an article based on the research.  

How do you get to the bottom of such a big question?

The study was essentially divided into three parts: the referendum campaign and the vote itself; changes in attitudes to membership over time going back to the early 2000s; and finally the consequences of Brexit for the UK economy and society.

The team used data from monthly cross section surveys of the British electorate dating back to 2004, collected as part of the Essex Continuous Monitoring Survey. They also completed a two wave panel survey, questioning the same people before and after voting day, plus a unique survey of UKIP party members.

The data was then analysed using a variety of modelling techniques to identify exactly what happened to public opinion on this issue over this period.

“It’s important to understand that the methodology used is not just fancy footwork. Robust methodology paints the fairest picture, making the study and its conclusions a more scientific and reliable exercise," added Professor Whiteley.

So, why did we vote to leave the EU?

Professor Whiteley said: “Brexit will be a constitutional change that will have implications for the world of politics and our society as a whole for a long time to come. As academics we have a role to play in scientifically analysing how and why this massive change came about.”

He attributes the electorate’s decision to a number of inter-locking things.

Membership of the European Union wasn’t delivering

The data showed that there had been enormous variations in attitudes towards the European Union over the last decade. The big picture is that people supported membership if they felt that it was delivering what they wanted – a prosperous economy, protection against crime and terrorism, control over immigration and efficient public services. If they did not feel that membership helped to deliver these things, or worse still prevented the British government from delivering them they opposed membership. Many of the latter felt ‘left behind’ by changes in society and the economy.

The recession of 2008

Professor Whiteley feels that Britain’s failure to effectively recover from the worst recession for over 70 years coloured the whole backdrop of the referendum, leaving many people feeling discontented and unrepresented.

The collapse of power in the Middle East

The series of protests, demonstrations, riots, coups and civil wars that began in 2010 across the Middle East and North Africa and have become known as the Arab Spring, created new waves of immigration into Europe. Many voters concluded that not only had successive UK governments mishandled this issue but so had the European Commission.

“Angela Merkel threw open Germany’s borders and in doing so broke a number of EU regulations. This only served to harden views on immigration across the rest of the EU and Britain. People felt they’d lost control of it, and fear and anxiety crept in as a consequence.”

Austerity

In managing their economy, the EU opted for austerity – resulting in significant problems for countries including Greece and Italy. Professor Whiteley believes austerity did not work, delayed economic recovery both in Europe and Britain and stimulated euroscepticism.

The ‘Leave’ camp’s dual campaign

The study identifies a possibly unintentional advantage for the Leave campaign – the ability to mobilise two types of voters, with an official campaign and a less official grassroots campaign.

“The Leave campaign was divided. We had the official campaign led by Boris Johnson that galvanised the part of the electorate that saw themselves as respectable and conservative. Then we had the more unofficial grassroots campaign led by Nigel Farage that appeared to galvanise those that felt left behind, giving way to the populist movement,” said Professor Whiteley.

Usually a split camp weakens a campaign – this time it served it well.

What will the consequences of Brexit be?

The economy

Professor Whiteley notes that before the referendum, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, issued extremely dour predictions for the effect of Brexit on the economy. These predictions went all the way to 2030.

“Quite simply we object to those predictions. The models used to make them are just not capable of forecasting that far ahead.”

Professor Whiteley also notes that Britain’s economy did not receive a boost when it joined the EU back in 1973, it merely continued along the same trend. The team then looked at what had happened to the economies of the 27 other member states when they had joined the EU at varying times over the last four decades. They found that in 20 of the 28 countries economic growth slowed after joining. In eight of the countries growth increased. But these were mainly eastern European countries who joined after the collapse of communism freeing up their economies and societies and catching up with their long-established counterparts in the west. This process known as ‘catch up’ would probably have occurred anyway even if they had not joined the EU.

“Although we appreciate the difference between joining and leaving, we think that if joining the EU didn’t make much of a difference to our economic growth, leaving shouldn’t be as bad as we’re being told. We feel it’s clear that the predictions from the Remainers were overblown and overly negative.”

Immigration

Currently there are two forms of immigration into the UK; uncontrolled immigration from the EU and controlled immigration from outside. Professor Whiteley’s study noted that net migration into Britain had grown sharply in recent years for both types and they are currently rather similar in size. Therefore it has been argued that controlling EU immigration after Brexit will be very difficult if it cannot be controlled from outside the EU. However, there is a key difference between the two types of immigration revealed by the modelling. Immigration from the EU is largely economic based on job-seeking, something which is much less true of immigration from outside the EU. If the Home Office successfully applies restrictions on economic migration across the board post Brexit, then the numbers would come down from the EU.

The fragmentation of British politics

Professor Whiteley is monitoring the polls in the current election campaign and is finding them dynamic and ever changing. Elections results used to be based around the electorate’s strong allegiance to a particular party. But now this is fragmenting and the party system is fragmenting as weakening party attachments produce large scale volatility in electoral behaviour.

“The party system is coming unglued. This is important because a fragmented system makes it harder to govern and makes policymaking and planning much more difficult – and therein lies the serious consequences of populism, something there is still significant problem for in the UK,” he said.

On Thursday, Britain voted to leave the European Union— an option dubbed "Brexit." Almost 52 percent of Britons voted in favor of leaving.

Although the "leave" campaign often focused on emotional arguments about immigration, there are in fact many reasons those in favor of leaving believed it would benefit the UK. They came from across the political spectrum, and some of the arguments even contradict others. Here are seven of the most significant.

Argument 1: The EU threatens British sovereignty

Brexit supporter and former London Mayor Boris Johnson.

Photo by Yui Mok - WPA Pool/Getty Images

This is probably the most common argument among intellectual-minded people on the British right, expressed by Conservative politicians such as former London Mayor Boris Johnson and Justice Minister Michael Gove.

Over the past few decades, a series of EU treaties have shifted a growing amount of power from individual member states to the central EU bureaucracy in Brussels. On subjects where the EU has been granted authority — like competition policy, agriculture, and copyright and patent law — EU rules override national laws.

Euroskeptics emphasize that the EU’s executive branch, called the European Commission, isn’t directly accountable to voters in Britain or anyone else. British leaders have some influence on the selection of the European Commission’s members every five years. But once the body has been chosen, none of its members are accountable to the British government or to Britons’ elected representatives in the European Parliament.

Argument 2: The EU is strangling the UK in burdensome regulations

Critics like Johnson say the EU’s regulations have become increasingly onerous:

Sometimes these EU rules sound simply ludicrous, like the rule that you can’t recycle a teabag, or that children under eight cannot blow up balloons, or the limits on the power of vacuum cleaners. Sometimes they can be truly infuriating – like the time I discovered, in 2013, that there was nothing we could do to bring in better-designed cab windows for trucks, to stop cyclists being crushed. It had to be done at a European level, and the French were opposed.

Many British conservatives look at the European bureaucracy in Brussels the same way American conservatives view the Washington bureaucracy. Gove has argued that EU regulations cost the British economy "£600 million every week" ($880 million). (Though this figure is disputed.)

Argument 3: The EU entrenches corporate interests and prevents radical reforms

Photo by Matt Cardy/Getty Images

This is the mirror image of the previous two arguments. Whereas many British conservatives see the EU as imposing left-wing, big-government policies on Britain, some on the British left see things the other way around: that the EU’s antidemocratic structure gives too much power to corporate elites and prevents the British left from making significant gains.

"The EU is anti-democratic and beyond reform," said Enrico Tortolano, campaign director for Trade Unionists against the EU, in an interview with Quartz. The EU "provides the most hospitable ecosystem in the developed world for rentier monopoly corporations, tax-dodging elites and organized crime," writes British journalist Paul Mason.

This left-wing critique of the EU is part of a broader critique of elite institutions more generally, including the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank. Brexit supporters on the left would have a lot in common with Americans who are against trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Argument 4: The EU was a good idea, but the euro is a disaster

The United Kingdom has had a significant faction of euroskeptics ever since it joined the EU in 1973. But until recently, this was a minority position.

"There are nearly 130 Conservative MPs who have declared for leaving the EU," economist Andrew Lilico told me last week. "If you went back 10 years, you would have struggled to find more than 20 who even in private would have supported leaving the EU."

So what changed their minds? The global recession that began in 2008 was bad around the world, but it was much worse in countries that had adopted Europe’s common currency, the euro. The unemployment rate shot up above 20 percent in countries like Greece and Spain, triggering a massive debt crisis. Seven years after the recession began, Spain and Greece are still suffering from unemployment rates above 20 percent, and many economists believe the euro was the primary culprit.

Luckily, the UK chose not to join the common currency, so there’s little danger of the euro directly cratering the British economy. But the euro’s dismal performance still provides extra ammunition to Brexit supporters.

Many economists believe that deeper fiscal and political integration will be needed for the eurozone to work properly. Europe needs a common welfare and tax system so that countries facing particularly severe downturns — like Greece and Spain — can get extra help from the center.

But that makes Britain’s continued inclusion in the EU awkward. Britain is unlikely to go along with deeper fiscal integration, but it would also be unwieldy to create a set of new, parallel eurozone-specific institutions that excluded the UK.

So, the argument goes, it might be better for everyone if the UK got out of the EU, clearing the path for the rest of the EU to evolve more quickly into a unified European state.

Nigel Farage, leader of the far-right United Kingdom Independence Party, has focused his campaign for Brexit on limiting immigration.

Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

The intellectual case for Brexit is mostly focused on economics, but the emotional case for Brexit is heavily influenced by immigration. EU law guarantees that citizens of one EU country have the right to travel, live, and take jobs in other EU countries.

British people have increasingly felt the impact of this rule since the 2008 financial crisis. The eurozone has struggled economically, and workers from eurozone countries such as Ireland, Italy, and Lithuania (as well as EU countries like Poland and Romania that have not yet joined the common currency) have flocked to the UK in search of work.

"In recent years, hundreds of thousands of Eastern Europeans have come to Britain to do a job," British journalist and Brexit supporter Douglas Murray told me last week. This, he argues, has "undercut the native working population."

The UK absorbed 333,000 new people, on net, in 2015. That’s a significant number for a country Britain’s size, though according to the CIA the UK still received slightly fewer net migrants, relative to population, than the United States in 2015.

Immigration has become a highly politicized issue in Britain, as it has in the United States and many other places over the past few years. Anti-immigration campaigners like Nigel Farage, the leader of the far-right UK Independence Party, have argued that the flood of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe has depressed the wages of native-born British workers. Some voters are also concerned about immigrants using scarce public services.

"One of the causes for the great public disgruntlement," Murray argues, is that Labour governments at the turn of the century "massively understated the numbers [of immigrants] to be expected," creating public distrust of current pledges to keep migration under control.

While many Brexit supporters simply want to reduce the amount of immigration overall, others argue that the UK could have a more sensible immigration system if it didn’t have the straitjacket of the EU.

EU rules require the UK to admit all EU citizens who wants to move to Britain, whether or not they have good job prospects or English skills.

"Leave" advocates argue that the UK should be focused on admitting immigrants who will bring valuable skills to the country and integrate well into British culture. They mention the point-based immigration systems of Canada and Australia, which award potential migrants points based on factors like their language and job skills, education, and age. That, "leave" advocates argue, would allow the UK to admit more doctors and engineers who speak fluent English, and fewer unskilled laborers with limited English skills.

The EU doesn’t have the power to directly collect taxes, but it requires member states to make an annual contribution to the central EU budget. Currently, the UK’s contribution is worth about £13 billion ($19 billion) per year, which is about $300 per person in the UK. ("Leave" supporters have been citing a larger figure, but that figure ignores a rebate that’s automatically subtracted from the UK’s contribution.)

While much of this money is spent on services in the UK, Brexit supporters still argue that it would be better for the UK to simply keep the money and have Parliament decide how to spend it.

How the euro caused the Greek crisis