Values and voting in the EU Referendum
Measuring values
It has been troubling me for some time that the discussion of the factors behind the Brexit vote has become polarised around the ‘economic’ vs ‘cultural’ factors, with a side helping of populism, without enough attention being paid to exactly what is being measured in each of these domains and how they connect to other values and dispositions. This problem is exacerbated by the available data, where almost all commentators must rely on the same limited measures of values available on the large datasets.
The British Election Study datasets are one such source. However, using wave 10 of the internet panel allows us to compare different values and dispositions around authoritarianism, nationalism and populism and how these relate to voting in the EU Referendum.
Five ‘value’ scales are derived from the wave 10 data (collected late in 2016). These measure ‘economic’ left-right; liberal-authoritarian; ethnocentrism, populism and attitudes to authority in parenting (authoritarian parenting; a measure shown to be highly correlated with authoritarian attitudes more generally in the wider literature). The scales are created by coding the items such that low values represent the ‘left, ‘liberal’, least ethnocentric, least populist and least authoritarian parenting values respectively, each set of items are then averaged to create a position on each scale between 1 and 5.
The items making up each scale are:
Relationships between values
Before looking at the impact of these values on Eu referendum voting, we can look at the relationships between them. The simplest way to do this is to consider the pattern of bi-variate correlations between the scales.
The correlations reveal interesting, and perhaps surprising patterns. It is not a surprise to find that the largest correlation is between the Liberal-Authoritarian scale and Authoritarian parenting values as this link is well-established. What is perhaps more surprising is the relationship between the populism scale and the other value scales. There is a moderately strong correlation between both populism and the liberal-authoritarian scale and populism and the left-right (economic) scale. But these are in opposite directions. Higher scores on the populist scale are associated with higher (more authoritarian) scores on the liberal-authoritarian scale but with lower (more left-wing) scores on the left-right scale. This highlights clearly the need to think beyond a simple designation of populism as ‘right-wing authoritarian’ as is often the case. Populism appeals to those who hold left-wing economic values and those with authoritarian social values.
The correlation between populism and ethnocentrism is very small, again perhaps surprising given the way that these have been linked in discussions of the populist surge around Brexit. While greater ethnocentrism is associated with both authoritarian positions and more ‘right-wing’ economic positions.
The relationship between values and EU referendum vote
We have seen how these dispositions relate to each other, how do they relate to voting behaviour in the EU referendum. Figure 2 shows the average position on each of the scales for leave and remain voters in the EU referendum.
In all cases leave voters score more highly on the scales, on average, than remain voters. In other words, leave voters are more ‘right-wing’, authoritarian, ethnocentric, populist, in favour of authoritarian parenting values and less tolerant than are remain voters. But the size of the gap between the two groups varies. The gap on the economic ‘left-right’ scale is small, in line with findings elsewhere that these economic values were not a key driver of EU referendum voting. The largest gap is on the ‘Liberal-Authoritarian’ scale (and the Authoritarianism scale from the face to face survey), there are also significant gaps on the other measures.
When adding each of these scales into a simple model predicting a ‘leave’ vote in the referendum, the results are more complex still. Due to the much-reduced sample size for the authoritarian parenting scale (around 1/3rd of the sample) the model is fitted both including (model 1) and excluding (model 2) this item. The contribution to the model of a leave vote is measured using the change in the AIC between the ‘full model’ and a model which excludes that scale. On this basis, the largest contribution to the model is from the populism scale, with ethnocentrism and the liberal-authoritarian dimensions having lower contributions of a similar magnitude to each other. The left-right dimension has by the far the smallest contribution to the model (though it is nonetheless statistically significant in this large sample).
To further illustrate the impact of each scale figure 4 shows the change in the predicted probability of a leave vote resulting from a 0.5 move towards the ‘right’, authoritarian, ethnocentric or populist end of the scale from the neutral position (mid-point) on all scales (calculated from Model 2 for more robust estimates).
This reinforces the patterns above, a move of 0.5 towards the ‘populist’ end of the value scale increases the predicted probability of a leave vote by almost 14 points. While a move of 0.5 towards the ‘right’ of the economic left-right scale increases the likelihood of a leave vote by 4 points. (It is worth noting that this effect while small is statistically significant but in the opposite direction to that most usually attributed to the role of economics in the EU referendum, it is those on the right who are (a little) more likely to be leave voters once other values are taken into account).
Understanding the role of values
Increasingly, the debate has centred on the role of ‘cultural’ values in EU referendum voting, indeed some have suggested it represents the start of ‘culture wars’ in Britain. Certainly, the largest difference between leave and remain voters is found on this scale. But there are also differences according to populist and ethnocentric values which themselves intersect with both economic and cultural values in complex ways.
Populist values are associated with left-wing economic values and authoritarian values, a complex mix of the economic and the social. While ethnocentric values are also associated with authoritarian values but with right-wing economics. How these complex dispositions interact, cross-cut and reinforce each other within the electorate will be important to understanding how the electorate reacts to any Brexit deal (or no deal); any new or revamped political parties and future general elections.