European but not European enough: An explanation for Brexit
| Author | Noah Carl,James Dennison,Geoffrey Evans |
| DOI | 10.1177/1465116518802361 |
| Published date | 01 June 2019 |
| Date | 01 June 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
European Union Politics
European but not
2019, Vol. 20(2) 282–304
! The Author(s) 2018
European enough: An
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DOI: 10.1177/1465116518802361
explanation for Brexit
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Noah Carl
Nuffield College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
James Dennison
Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European
University Institute, Florence, Italy
Geoffrey Evans
Nuffield College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Abstract
To date, most accounts of the UK’s vote to leave the EU have focussed on explaining
variation across individuals and constituencies within the UK. In this article, we attempt
to answer a different question, namely ‘Why was it the UK that voted to leave, rather
than any other member state?’. We show that the UK has long been one of the most
Eurosceptic countries in the EU, which we argue can be partly explained by Britons’
comparatively weak sense of European identity. We also show that existing explana-
tions of the UK’s vote to leave cannot account for Britons’ long-standing
Euroscepticism: the UK scores lower than many other member states on measures
of inequality/austerity, the ‘losers of globalisation’ and authoritarian values, and some of
these measures are not even correlated with Euroscepticism across member states. In
addition, we show that the positive association between national identity and
Euroscepticism is stronger in the UK than in most other EU countries. Overall, we
conclude that Britons’ weak sense of European identity was a key contributor to the
Brexit vote.
Corresponding author:
Noah Carl, Nuffield College, New Road, Oxford, OX11NF, UK.
Email: noah.carl@nuffield.ox.ac.uk
Carl et al.
283
Keywords
Brexit, European identity, Euroscepticism, losers of globalisation, United Kingdom
England thus asked in turn to enter, but on her own conditions. This poses without
doubt to each of the six states, and poses to England, problems of a very great
dimension. England in effect is insular, she is maritime, she is linked through her
exchanges, her markets, her supply lines to the most diverse and often the most
distant countries; she pursues essentially industrial and commercial activities, and
only slight agricultural ones. She has in all her doings very marked and very original
habits and traditions. In short, the nature, the structure, the very situation that are
England’s differ profoundly from those of the continentals.
—Charles de Gaulle, January 1963,
explaining his veto on British membership of the European Economic Community
Introduction
Since the United Kingdom’s referendum on European Union membership on 23
June 2016, at least four major explanations have been put forward for the vote to
leave. The first explanation attributes the result to relatively short-run campaign
effects; the second cites economic inequality and fiscal austerity policies; the third
invokes the so-called ‘losers of globalisation’; and the fourth appeals to Leave
voters’ authoritarian values. Although several of these explanations offer consid-
erable insight into why individuals voted the way they did, none of them provides
an empirically valid account of why the United Kingdom (UK), rather than any
other member state, voted to leave. In this article, we argue that Britons’ compar-
atively weak sense of European identity partly explains why the UK has long been
one of the most Eurosceptic countries in the European Union (EU). We further
argue that, as the EU moved closer toward political union and immigration into
the UK increased, the UK’s fundamentally less European identity meant that more
than 50% of voters opted for Leave in the referendum.
Our article contributes to the burgeoning literature on Brexit (e.g. Clarke et al.,
2017; Evans and Menon, 2017; Hobolt, 2016) by providing an all-important com-
parative perspective. Indeed, whereas most existing accounts of the UK’s vote to
leave the EU have focussed on explaining variation across individuals and constit-
uencies within the UK, we attempt to answer a different question namely, ‘Why
was it the UK that voted to leave, rather than any other member state?’. By
presenting evidence from both multi-level models and cross-country analyses, we
show that Britons’ weak sense of European identity was a key contributor to the
Brexit vote. Specifically, we use fixed-effects models to show that strength of
national (rather than European) identity can explain nearly a third of the gap in
284
European Union Politics 20(2)
Euroscepticism between the UK and other member states, whereas socio-economic
characteristics and measures of losing out from globalisation can only explain
about 10% of the gap. We then use models with cross-level interaction effects to
demonstrate that national identity has a stronger association with Euroscepticism
in the UK than in most other member states. Finally, we use country-level data to
confirm that strength of national identity is the only measure that satisfies two
conditions
necessary
for
explaining
Brexit:
first,
being
correlated
with
Euroscepticism across EU countries; and second, being a measure on which the
UK (the only member state to leave) appears exceptional.
Explaining the Brexit vote
This section describes the existing explanations for Brexit, explains why they are
insufficient, and introduces our hypothesis that Britons’ weak sense of European
identity accounts for their long-standing Euroscepticism. One popular explanation
for Brexit is that voters were swayed by the misleading arguments and incendiary
tone of the Leave campaign. For example, Lewis (2016) contends that the Leave
campaign––unfettered by the advertising standards that regulate non-political
campaigns––‘lied to us’ and ‘won by pretending there are simple answers to our
problems’. Similarly, Yeung (2016) cites legal arguments promulgated by the aca-
demic Michael Dougan, according to whom the Leave campaign used ‘dishonesty
as a primary tool to win votes’. Particularly notable in this regard is the Leave
campaign’s claim that ‘we send the EU £350 million per week’, which was even
criticised by the Chair of the UK Statistics Authority (Norgrove, 2017).
Why is this explanation insufficient? To begin with, it has already been chal-
lenged by other scholars. Clarke et al. (2016) applied dynamic factor analysis to the
results of 121 Internet and phone polls carried out during 2016 and found that
Leave may have had the lead throughout the entire campaign, which suggests that
provocative statements made by Leave campaigners (e.g. Nigel Farage, Boris
Johnson) are unlikely to have exerted decisive sway over prospective voters.
Moreover, as Becker et al. (2017) point out, most of the district-level variation
in support for Leave can be explained by demographic and economic variables that
are not malleable in the short-term. Indeed, the balance of support for Leave
versus Remain did not change much during the two years prior to the referendum;
both remained at around 40% until the summer of 2015, when opinion began to
crystallise, and the fraction answering ‘don’t know’ took a downward trend (Evans
and Prosser, 2016). Finally, this explanation fails to account for the fact that the
UK has long been one of the most––if not the most––Eurosceptic countries in
the EU.
A second explanation posits that the vote to leave was not the expression of
Euroscepticism per se, but was rather a proxy for voters’ frustrations over low
living standards, income inequality and cuts to public services. Dorling (2016: 1–2)
contends that we should blame austerity not immigration for the referendum deci-
sion, arguing that deteriorating social spending, coupled with high levels of
Carl et al.
285
economic inequality, impelled Britons to opt for Leave. He concludes that ‘to
distract us from these national failings, we have been encouraged to blame immi-
gration and the EU’. Similarly, Bernstein (2016) points to the cross-country cor-
relation between fiscal austerity and rises in unemployment, before concluding
that––through the ‘fiscal malpractice’ of budget austerity––the government
‘played a role in bringing us Brexit’. Why is this explanation insufficient?
Although poorer areas of the UK were indeed more likely to support Leave
(Becker et al., 2017), measures of Euroscepticism show little correlation with
measures of inequality and austerity across EU member states––as we show in
the Analysis section. In addition, neither ‘austerity’ nor ‘inequality’ was among the
most frequently cited reasons for voting Leave (Lord Ashcroft, 2016; Prosser
et al., 2016).
A third explanation focuses on a group that has been dubbed the ‘losers of
globalisation’: older, white, economically disadvantaged individuals who have
turned against a political class they regard as privileged and out-of-touch, and
who reject recent changes in British society that have left them economically and
socially marginalised (Clarke et al., 2017; Curtice, 2016; Ford, 2016). These indi-
viduals, who lack the skills necessary to compete in a global marketplace, osten-
sibly voted for Brexit as way to protest against the economic consequences of
globalisation: post-industrial decline, mass immigration and sweeping cultural
change (see Evans and Menon, 2017). For example, Hobolt (2016: 1259) demon-
strates that all of the commonly cited characteristics of these ‘left behind’ voters––
older age, less education, lower income, less trust in politicians, more populist
political attitudes––were positively associated with voting Leave. She concludes
that ‘anti-immigration...
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