Individual demographics had a huge effect in determining the outcome of the referendum, but the characteristics of local areas mattered as well, explain Monica Langella and Alan Manning. Immigration, the decline in manufacturing and in other sectors, as well as politics, all played an important role in deciding the outcome.
The UK’s vote to leave the EU on 23 June has induced much speculation about the factors behind people’s decision. From opinion polls (e.g. the Ashcroft Polls) we know that the old and the less educated were more likely to vote Leave. But it’s likely that voting was not just determined by individual characteristics but by those of local areas. Indeed, the main hypotheses put forward for the Leave vote are that it represents the reaction of those who have been left behind because of globalization (as Gordon Brown argued) or immigration.
This article reports the result of an exercise in which the vote share for Leave in the 380 areas of England, Wales and Scotland are regressed on a variety of area characteristics largely drawn from the census for 2011 and earlier decades. These characteristics are for the population as a whole – not for those eligible to vote (British citizens), registered to vote and actual voters in the referendum. Nevertheless the variables we use can explain 90 per cent of the variation in the vote share across areas.
The effects reported below are “all other things constant” – all are significantly different from zero, to use the jargon. So based on demographics we find that:
- A 10 percentage point increase in the share of graduates is associated with a 11.2 percentage point reduction in the vote for leave
- A 10 percentage point increase in the share of students is associated with a 5.0 percentage point reduction in the vote for leave
- A 10 percentage point increase in the share of the population aged 60+ is associated with a 3 percentage point increase in the vote for leave
- A 10 percentage point increase in the white share of the population is associated with a 2.0 percentage point increase in the vote for leave
But we also find the following:
- A 10 percentage point increase in the migrant share of the population is associated with a 3.3 percentage point increase in the vote for leave. It would appear that concerns about migration did influence the vote.
- It is not just the level but the change in the migrant share from 1991 to 2011 that seems to have been important. And the proportionate change seems more important than the absolute change. A doubling of the migrant share is predicted to raise the leave vote by 1.3 percentage points.
- Changing industrial structure is important. A fall of 10 percentage points in the change in the share of employment in agriculture, manufacturing, mining and construction from 1981 to 2011 is associated with a rise in the leave vote of 1.2 per cent. But it’s not just heavy industry – a fall of 10 percentage points in the change in the share of employment from 1981 to 2011 in public administration, health and education is associated with a rise in the leave vote of 1.8 per cent.
- Scotland is 16.5 percentage points less likely to vote for leave. Perhaps surprisingly given its population mix, London is actually slightly more likely than most regions to have voted leave though the difference is not statistically significant. London voted to remain because its population is younger, better-educated and less white than most of the country (though it also has more immigrants) not because its voters have different attitudes to those in the rest of the country.
- A rise of 10 percentage points in the current share of the working age population in employment is associated with a 1.3 per cent rise in the leave vote – current worklessness does not seem to explain the vote to leave. So even though the UK labour market currently appears job rich there seems little in the way of a feel-good factor that has influenced the vote to remain.
It is possible that different factors that we do not include in the analysis are the ultimate explanation for the referendum outcome and that other studies can do a better job in explaining the results. Our colleagues Steve Machin and Brian Bell in the FT suggested that wage growth can explain the vote – though we find it only marginally significant when other variables are included.
Our analysis suggests that individual demographics had a huge effect, but it also points out that concerns about immigration and long-run decline in manufacturing and related sectors played an important role in deciding the outcome. And the fact that Scotland stands out as being radically different from England and Wales, suggests that perhaps the political dimension was important as well.
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Monica Langella is Research Officer at the Centre for Economic Performance.
Alan Manning is Professor of Economics at LSE and Director of the Community Programme at the Centre for Economic Performance.
Image credit via a CC BY NC ND licence
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we are interested in the diversity of these characteristics in gatherings of men found in various geographical regions and in various social classes
Personality as continuity of identity is a critically important characteristic of the person. Likewise, we are interested in the diversity of these characteristics in gatherings of men found in various geographical regions and in various social classes. Also, this is on the grounds that the common characteristic has been greed, and it doesn’t make a difference whether its people living past their means or governments living past their means or individuals seeking to get rich quick.
Personality as continuity of identity is a critically important characteristic of the person. Likewise, we are interested in the diversity of these characteristics in gatherings of men found in various geographical regions and in various social classes. Also, this is on the grounds that the common characteristic has been greed, and it doesn’t make a difference whether its people living past their means or governments living past their means or individuals seeking to get rich quick.
Post Brexit, I’ve been thinking along the lines of values and rightly or wrongly have come to the conclusion that Brexit values align with a more communitarian outlook whereas Bremain values align with a more liberal outlook. This points to the dynamic between communitarianism and liberalism with the former evoking a need for community continuity and stability underlied by democracy and resilience and the latter evoking a need for community change and growth underlied by technocracy and wealth.
However, the trouble with liberalism and its inherent need for change and growth is that it is ecologically and socially deconstructive which is a good thing if change and growth is required but also a bad thing since it is inherently unsustainable. Liberalism, whether social or economic, is fundamentally unsustainable because if all living things had the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness then we would all starve or else be immobilised by moral constraint. This belies the fact that the sustainability of life is underpinned by life/death relationships but if not properly managed, these life/death relationships will inherently lead to unmanaged competition even if under the liberal framework of individual rights-based entitlements. In effect then, liberalism facilitates accumulation with few restrictions other than be nice to one another. This is why economic liberalism inherently leads to the formation of monopolies of power and consumerism and why social liberalism hollows out communities and leads to atomisation, loneliness and identity politics.
In this respect liberalism as a social policy tool has been a good thing in terms of deconstructing traditional communities based on entrenched patterns of patriarchy, gender inequality and class inequality but this creative destruction and has been a good thing in terms of improving standards of living now needs to be rolled back in order to allow communities to recoalesce around virtue-based value systems and in particular, ones I argue that are designed to create a sustainable future and so built on a platform of community democracy and community resilience.
This I think is the true nature of the Brexit backlash against the eu and the globalised liberalism that it supports. Unmanaged liberalism is inherently unsustainable and destructive and whilst it is a useful ideology to deconstruct and reform communities as a social change tool, at some point it is necessary to withdraw the use of this tool in order to allow communities to reformulate around different principles. It is therefore with irony that with regards the eu debate, the communitarians (brexiters) were using liberalism (democracy and the right to self-determination including border controls) to support their communitarian arguments whilst liberals (bremainers) were using communitarianism (cooperation and eu safeguards) to support their liberal arguments.
This highlights that liberalism functions as dynamic with communitarianism with the former being used to evoke change and growth through competition wheras the latter is used to evoke continuity and stability through cooperation. As such, yes the competition of liberalism is as important as the cooperation of communitarianism but each needs to be recognised for the benefits and losses they bring in order to manage social change and social continuity. In this respect, progress for its own sake and the constant social change and growth that liberalism brings through self-interested competition is damaging and unsustainable if it is not democratically consented to by all segments of society. In effect, by trying to bring half of a society unwillingly into the liberal mold whether through eu membership or through centralised government imposition that in effect manages eu policy is not only undemocratic but also exclusive of others that might wish for continuity and stability in order to build up decentralised democracy and resilience.
Liberalism does not allow for this regrounding of community values because it relies upon competition or creative destruction in order to constantly change and grow society or in international order terms, liberalism does not allow community cohesion because it requires communities to cooperate in order to compete in order to evoke change and growth on a global level.
In conclusion, without recognising that liberalism (individual liberty) forms an antogonistic relationship with communitarianism (social cohesion) and that the two need to be mediated according to democratic consensus then we are not only damaging our ecological and social relations through imposed competition (which arises because liberalism is unable to reconcile the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness when expanded to all living life-forms) but we are also damaging our relation with our self since when this competitive outlook is internalised,it begins to form a divided and antagonistic self which goes some way to explain the bigoted behaviour from both sides of the eu debate.
So whilst liberalism is an important socio-economic policy tool to evoke change and growth through the application of negative rights, the inherently competitive and unsustainable effects of liberalism need to be recognised as such and so in turn, it needs to be recognised that liberalism has as its complimentary opposite a communitarian perspective that evokes continuity and stability through the application of positive rights which allows diverse communities to cooperate on a platform of responsibility and resilience which is mediated by democracy in order that diverse communities can formulate their own identities and values. However, if over time this continuity and stability creates entrenched inequalities, then liberalism again becomes useful to creatively deconstruct these entrenched inequalities. As such liberalism and its inherently competitve outcomes and communitarianism with its inherently cooperative outcomes are social policy tools which can be applied to varying degrees to create a managed dynamic between change and continuity. So, if continuity (and sustainability) is required then communitarianism needs to come to the fore whereas if change (and unsustainability) is required then liberalism needs to come to the fore. At present I would argue that communitatrianism needs to come to the fore in order to ingrain communities with a sustainable development ethic based on stability which I argue would be best achieved by creating a global cooperative network of decentralised democratic communities which is underpinned by an ethos of decentralised community resilience.