Long-Term Economic Distress, Cultural Backlash, and Support for Brexit

By Miguel Carreras, Yasemin Irepoglu Carreras, S. Bowler. Comparative Political Studies, 2019

145 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Economic and cultural factors are often presented as alternative explanations of Brexit. Most studies have failed to recognize the interplay between contextual economic factors and individual attitudes such as nativism and Euroscepticism. We argue that both economic and cultural factors matter to explain the outcome of the referendum. Economic factors are critical because they shape cultural attitudes. British citizens who live in economically depressed and declining districts are more likely to develop anti-immigrant and Eurosceptic views. These cultural grievances, in turn, explain support for Brexit. Using both aggregate economic and electoral data at the local level (380 districts) and data from the 7th wave of the British Election Study 2014-2017 panel, we find strong support for our argument that cultural grievances mediate the effect of long-term economic decline on support for Brexit. Our results have important policy implications, and suggest targeted economic policies are necessary to protect the “losers of globalization.”

Subfields: Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a4088dff6c2bc9325b01474683f45819ace4db90

Citations in the corpus

• The Economic Origins of Authoritarian Values: Evidence From Local Trade Shocks in the United Kingdom (2021, unknown): “…distinction that we make here is that we have in mind economic shocks that have a sustained long-term effect on local communities and especially local labor demand, like China’s integration with the world economy, as opposed to less permanent business cycle changes (see also Carreras et al. 2019).”