Divided by Brexit: a quantitative study of remain, leave and party identities in British politics

Thesis

The way individuals perceive themselves is frequently interconnected with their group memberships, giving rise to what is commonly referred to as their ‘social identity’. As a result, individuals tend to perceive the world through a lens that enhances the reputation of the groups they belong to and exhibit a positive bias towards those who share the same in-group membership. Partisanship is an example of a social identity in the political sphere. People with a strong partisan identity evaluate policy outcomes more positively when their party holds power and view co-partisans more positively than out-partisans. In recent years, a new social identity has entered the political sphere in Britain, ‘Brexit’ identity, with many people exhibiting in-group and out-group bias according to the side they took in the EU referendum debate. In this thesis, I address how party and Brexit identity affected the British electorate in the context of this new, salient and divisive political issue. I show that the effects of campaigning during the lead-up to the Brexit referendum were mostly small, but differed significantly according to an individual’s partisan identity. I show that when a person consumed more media sources like television they self-identified more strongly with their side of the Brexit debate. I demonstrate that partisan identity affected evaluations of the UK’s performance during the COVID-19 pandemic, and attributions of responsibility for that outcome. Lastly, I find that Brexit identity had an even larger effect than partisanship on evaluations of pandemic performance, and also affected evaluations of how other countries performed during the pandemic. The findings have important implications for the literature on social identity, perceptual bias, and contemporary British politics.

Authors: Snow, D

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-0nqgr5ge0
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: partisanship; Brexit; quantitative methods; political idenity; political sociology
• Subjects: Political sociology