The United Kingdom is voting today. But while citizens will be casting votes for parties, they think of themselves more in relation to Brexit — as Leavers or Remainers — than in terms of party loyalty. A recent YouGov poll suggests 86 percent of voters feel attached to their Brexit choices, while only 68 percent of voters feel attached to a party. In new research, we find views on Brexit can be more important than party affiliation for determining votes, and they shape people’s willingness to contemplate violations of standard democratic norms.
Here is how Brexit has reshaped British politics.
Views on Brexit shape how people are going to vote
Views on Brexit cut across party lines, and shape how people are going to vote. While Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party is dedicated to finishing Brexit, some Conservatives would prefer Britain to remain in the European Union. Similarly, some Labour voters support Johnson’s Brexit strategy, rejecting their party’s ambiguous position of supporting another referendum. The Conservative Party wants to win Leave voters, while Labour wants to prevent Labour Remainers from defecting to the smaller pro-Remain Liberal Democrats.
British voters used to care about political parties. Now they just care about Brexit.
We conducted survey experiments with a diverse sample of more than 900 participants, which seem to suggest views on Brexit are more important than party identity. The sample was recruited online through Prolific UK and is nonrepresentative. The findings are based on differences between survey answers given by respondents to different sets of information. Each randomly assigned subset of respondents received different information before answering the same questions as did all other survey respondents. We analyzed the differences between these answers and found, for instance, that respondents were more predisposed toward information from politicians who shared their Brexit position but not their party than they were to politicians of their party who did not share their stance on Brexit.
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Brexit hurts voters’ adherence to basic democratic norms
For instance, we asked respondents to decide if a newspaper commentary that criticized their Brexit position in a hateful manner should be published online. The text involved strong accusations. If the text criticized their own views, only 13 percent of respondents supported its publication. However, when the text criticized the other side, 49 percent of respondents supported its publication. This suggests Brexit has made voters biased. They do not approve of hateful speech when it is about their views, but they are more likely to approve its publication when it is about those who have a different stance on Brexit.
Similarly, voters were more willing to tolerate their side’s breaking campaign laws than the other side’s infractions. They were asked to react to information about how one side broke laws during the 2016 referendum campaign and was fined for it. The fine given was supported by 54 percent of respondents when it was issued to those whose Brexit views they shared. The fine was supported by 77 percent of respondents when it was given to those with the opposing opinion about Brexit. Indeed, a recent survey by political scientists Ailsa Henderson and Richard Wyn Jones even found that a majority of respondents say the risk of violence against members of Parliament would be a “price worth paying” to reach their preferred Brexit outcome.
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We analyzed views on police violence and did not find Brexit stances created a strong bias. Respondents were about 7 percentage points more likely to disapprove of police violence when it would harm people who share their Brexit views than when it would harm those on the other side of the Brexit debate.
However, respondents favored working together with people who shared their views on Brexit. We invited a subset of the same survey respondents that we recruited via Prolific to solve an intellectual puzzle with a team. When asked to assemble this team from a selection of mock candidates who would assist them in solving the task, more than a quarter of respondents made their choice based on Brexit identities. They selected candidates who shared their Brexit position at the expense of others who would have been more qualified for the task.
Brexit shows how a tiny party can have big consequences.
This is reshaping basic political allegiances
Brexit is creating what political scientists call a “cleavage,” which divides people according to their views on a particular question. Citizens’ willingness to switch parties, support breaking democratic norms and so on shows how much polarization the Brexit referendum has left behind. That will remain a challenge for British democracy, no matter who wins the election.
Will Boris Johnson get the majority he needs to finish Brexit at last?
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Florian Stoeckel (@FlorianStoeckel) is a lecturer in politics at the University of Exeter (UK).
Max Talman is a master’s student at the University of Exeter (UK).