The University of Warwick has come up with the first detailed analysis of the reasons why people voted as they did in the EU referendum. As such it is an important document in its own right since all future work will inevitably reference it - and either confirm or challenge its conclusions. But for those of us who have been baffled by developments this year and are struggling to understand what has happened to our country it is a useful insight into what actually happened.
The study is basically an exercise in fairly simple statistics. If you aren't used to statistical language it would probably read like complicated statistics, but they didn't go much beyond what you can do on an Excel spreadsheet if you put your mind to it. And I thought the level of statistics that they used was pretty much the most appropriate to the job in hand. All they were trying to work out was a rough measure of what factors influenced the vote - so you didn't need to go over the top in terms of the treatment of the data. If they made it sound fancier than it was, well that is academic publishing for you.
So what of the actual results. A lot of what they found was that ideas that have floated around are not too far wide of the mark. Traditional Labour voting areas had a lower turn out relative to other areas suggesting that the notion that Jeremy Corbyn's campaigning efforts had for whatever reason failed to motivate those voters. People who were under pressure on their wage rates were more likely to vote leave. Older people were more likely to vote leave. And immigration was a factor, though not as strongly as might be supposed. The biggest eye opener for me personally was that it was possible to determine that high levels of specifically EU migration were correlated with a high leave vote rather than migration as a whole. That sort of gets leave voters off the hook for the accusation of racism since these migrants are white while migrants from elsewhere tend to be some other skin shade.
But the biggest surprise was that voting leave was also very much predicted by declining provision of social services. This has a poetically appealing side to it. It suggests that if Cameron and Osbourne hadn't been so keen to cut fiscal transfers to disadvantaged areas they might have got the result they wanted and kept their jobs. But it also indicates that the leave vote is much deeper entrenched than it would be if it were simply a case of disliking the EU. These old people on low wages with crumbling social support are angry. They are currently angry with the EU. The way things have played out, it looks like they are going to get rid of the EU. But the things that they are angry about are quite likely still going to be there.
This means that we are facing a future with a lot of pissed off voters. They don't seem enthusiastic about Labour. I wonder how much longer they will put up with the Tories. And I dread to think where they might turn next.
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cage/manage/publications/305-2016_becker_fetzer_novy.pdf
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