Taking back control? Investigating the role of immigration in the 2016 vote for Brexit
By M. Goodwin, Caitlin Milazzo. 2017
381 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The 2016 referendum marked a watershed moment in the history of the United Kingdom. The public vote to leave the European Union (EU)—for a ‘Brexit’—brought an end to the country’s membership of the EU and set it on a fundamentally different course. Recent academic research on the vote for Brexit points to the importance of immigration as a key driver, although how immigration influenced the vote remains unclear. In this article, we draw on aggregate-level data and individual-level survey data from the British Election Study (BES) to explore how immigration shaped public support for Brexit. Our findings suggest that, specifically, increases in the rate of immigration at the local level and sentiments regarding control over immigration were key predictors of the vote for Brexit, even after accounting for factors stressed by established theories of Eurosceptic voting. Our findings suggest that a large reservoir of support for leaving the EU, and perhaps anti-immigration populism more widely, will remain in Britain, so long as immigration remains a salient issue.
Subfields: Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8b7a6c91ad1765e3491f346b237c4aad734661de
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In Political Science and International Relations
Citations in the corpus
- Long-Term Economic Distress, Cultural Backlash, and Support for Brexit (2019, background): “However, a few studies find that support for Brexit was higher in areas that had experienced a recent increase in immigrant population (Goodwin & Milazzo, 2017; Langella & Manning, 2016).”
- Can Exposure to Celebrities Reduce Prejudice? The Effect of Mohamed Salah on Islamophobic Behaviors and Attitudes (2019, result): “Further complicating our expectations, the study period coincides with a Brexit process fueled by anti-immigrant sentiment (Goodwin and Milazzo 2017), but one that was ultimately rejected by 58.2% of Liverpool residents (BBC 2016).”