Gender-age gaps in Euroscepticism and vote choice at the United Kingdom’s 2016 referendum on EU membership
| Published date | 01 November 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13691481221110764 |
| Author | Ceri Fowler |
| Date | 01 November 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Original Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/13691481221110764
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2023, Vol. 25(4) 595 –616
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/13691481221110764
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Gender-age gaps in
Euroscepticism and vote choice
at the United Kingdom’s 2016
referendum on EU membership
Ceri Fowler
Abstract
The result of the Brexit referendum and its effect on subsequent UK elections have attracted a
large amount of media and scholarly interest, but there has been minimal research into gender
and voting behaviour at the referendum. Similarly, gendered differences in Euroscepticism have
had little attention. This article seeks to understand how attitudes towards the European Union
vary by age and gender and whether such gender-age gaps are associated with gender differences
in attributes known to predict European Union attitudes and support for Leave/Remain. The
article finds a gender gap in Euroscepticism in under-45s and in Brexit vote choice in under-25s. It
demonstrates that socioeconomic and value differences by gender are associated with the gender
gap in younger age groups, but not older. As such differences seem likely to persist, this article
suggests that gender divides will continue to have electoral and democratic consequences in the
United Kingdom and across Europe.
Keywords
Brexit, British politics, Euroscepticism, gender and voting behaviour
Introduction
Political scientists have long been interested in determining which factors influence atti-
tudes towards the European Union (EU) among its citizens, particularly since (usually
right-wing) Eurosceptic parties have become more successful and, in perhaps the ultimate
demonstration of negative EU attitudes, the United Kingdom voted Leave in 2016. The
differing importance of various economic and social factors, as well as the relative impact
of immigration and wider social change in determining attitudes towards the EU, has
been widely discussed. One factor has been largely missing in this discussion – gender.
This article fills this gap by providing an updated study of how gender affected attitudes
Department of Politics, The University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
Corresponding author:
Ceri Fowler, Department of Politics, The University of Manchester, Arthur Lewis Building, Oxford Road,
Manchester M13 9PL, UK.
Email: ceri.fowler@manchester.ac.uk; @cerifowler
1110764BPI0010.1177/13691481221110764The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsFowler
research-article2022
Original Article
596 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 25(4)
towards the EU and vote choice at the referendum. It provides a crucial study of how
gender and age can shape attitudes to the EU, how the ‘Brexit cleavage’ is gendered, and
why a gender gap occurred in the youngest age group at the 2019 General Election.
Previous studies of Euroscepticism have generally not focused on gender differences,
with the exception of Nelsen and Guth (2000), whose work focused on why women over-
all might be more Eurosceptic. It is likely that gender has not been widely studied as there
was no aggregate-level gender gap in vote choice (Shorrocks and Fowler, 2019). However,
the lack of a difference in the level of support for Leave between men and women is puz-
zling. The majority of explanations for the motivations of Leave voters draw on the litera-
ture on the populist radical right, particularly UK Independence Party (UKIP). But women
show lower levels of support for the radical right in general (Immerzeel et al., 2015) and
for UKIP in particular in the United Kingdom (De Geus and Ralph-Morrow, 2021; Ford
and Goodwin, 2014). Due to this, current explanations of Brexit may have inadvertently
been produced, which describe a certain type of older working-class men’s voting behav-
iour well, but which fail to account for women’s behaviour.
Furthermore, research into gender and voting behaviour demonstrates that focusing on
aggregate-level gender gaps and/or seeking to find a uniform effect of gender across
social groups can obscure the true extent of political differences between men and women
(see Campbell, 2006; Shorrocks, 2016, for UK analysis). This includes the 2019 General
Election, where Campbell and Shorrocks (2021) demonstrate that there was a gender gap
between younger men and women and that this was associated with prior referendum vote
choice. The same is true of the literature on the EU referendum. Even where gender is
focused upon, the relationship between age and gender is not considered (Guerrina et al.,
2018; Hozić and True, 2017). This potentially obscures the true extent of gender differ-
ences and how the important relationship between age and Euroscepticism (Down and
Wilson, 2013; Fox and Pearce, 2018) may be gendered.
If, as this article shows, gender gaps exist by age, we risk misrepresenting the views
of women (and men) who are particularly in favour of or opposed to the EU, as their
attitudes and the expression of these attitudes through their vote choices get lost in the
aggregate. Consistently passing over considering gender in research into Euroscepticism
and voting behaviour in favour of focusing on other demographics such as age or socio-
economic divides such as class, education, and income leaves women’s voices unheard
and fails to acknowledge that gender, in tandem with age, often forms a major determi-
nant in a person’s socioeconomic characteristics such as their education level.
Furthermore, such gender gaps, even if small, are likely to have electoral consequences
in the United Kingdom (as already shown).
This article seeks to rectify this by considering three research questions: (1) Were there
gender gaps in age groups in Euroscepticism in the United Kingdom prior to the 2016
referendum; relatedly, (2) were there gender gaps between age groups in vote choice at
the 2016 referendum; and finally, if the answer to one or both of the first two questions is
yes, (3) what explains these gaps? I answer these questions using the British Election
Study Internet Panel (BESIP) and find that there were gender gaps by age in attitudes
towards the EU. Specifically, younger women were less Eurosceptic and more likely to
vote Remain than men of the same age, but there were no gender differences for older age
groups. I show that gender differences in younger age groups are affected by differences
in established predictors of Euroscepticism between men and women, particularly educa-
tion level and related value differences.
I make three key contributions. First, this article contributes to the literature on
Euroscepticism by adding a gendered perspective and is the first to consider how and why
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