VARIATION IN DETERMINANTS OF SUPPORT FOR BREXIT – AN EXPLORATIVE STUDY OF ‘LEAVE’ & ‘REMAIN’ REGIONS

Abstract

This article aims  to shed light  on  the  possibility of individual level  determinants of voting for  ‘Leave’ in the Brexit referendum displaying varying  influence in regions that voted for leave or remain.
The effect of various factors influencing voters’ decisions has  been thoroughly researched in the  past years, with explanations around attitudes towards immigration, the domestic & personal situation, values, and socio-demography at the forefront. However, the scholarship has – with  some important exceptions – ignored the possibility that the strength and accuracy of these explanations could vary, bringing their contextual validity, i.e. the  equivalent influence of the determinants for support for Brexit across contexts, into question. Therefore, this  article addresses the question of how determinants of support for Brexit vary between "Leave" & "Remain" regions. The focus here is on Scotland, Northern Ireland and London as the  ‘Remain’ regions and Wales as well as the rest of the UK as the ‘Leave’ regions.Through a descriptive analysis of the  distribution of factors between regions (descriptive) and logistical survey regression investigating the  variance of determinants’ influence on voting decisions, some empirical evidence is produced that points towards the  possibility of determinants not possessing contextual validity.
While  the   descriptive analysis shows how most of the determinants are significantly differing in  their distribution across respondents, the multivariate analysis shows that they displayed different effects in the  two samples. Nonetheless, this article only presents a very basic starting point for much-needed further research that should employ more sophisticated methodology and sampling.