Brexit: understanding the socio-economic origins and consequencesThe Fault lines unveiled by BrexitMultiple economies: before and after BrexitAccidental tourists: Brexit and its toxic employment underpinningsBrexit and the elites: the elite versus the people or the fracturing of the British business elitesThe New Politics of Cosmopolitans and LocalsWhat Brexit tells us about institutions and social actionBrexit: the day of reckoning for the neo-functionalist paradigm of European UnionWorkers no longer welc

O’Reilly, Jacqueline; Froud, Julie; Warhurst, Chris; Morgan, Glenn; Grey, Christopher; Wood, Geoffrey; Boyer, Robert; Frerichs, Sabine; Róna‐Tas, Ákos; Galès, Patrick Le; Johal, Sukhdev; Williams, Karel; Wright, Mike; Sankari, Suvi

doi:10.1093/ser/mww043

Cited by 23 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 64 publications

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“…For decades, the EU regional policy has redistributed billions of Euros to mitigate regional disparities and sustain public support (Chalmers & Dellmuth 2015). Yet, with little success: the Brexit vote highlighted the serious consequences of economic divides across subnational areas for preferences towards EU integration (Hobolt 2016;O'Reilly et al 2016). Moreover, Eurosceptic voting seems to follow a spatial pattern that mirrors divides in regional wealth differentials (Schraff 2019).…”

Section: Regional Inequality As An Antecedent Cause Of Trustmentioning

confidence: 99%

Regional inequality and institutional trust in Europe

Lipps¹,

Schraff²

2020

European J Political Res

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Inequality is a central explanation of political distrust in democracies, but has so far rarely been considered a cause of (dis-)trust towards supranational governance. Moreover, while political scientists have extensively engaged with income inequality, other salient forms of inequality, such as the regional wealth distribution, have been sidelined. These issues point to a more general shortcoming in the literature. Determinants of trust in national and European institutions are often theorized independently, even though empirical studies have demonstrated large interdependence in citizens' evaluations of national and supranational governance levels. In this paper, we argue that inequality has two salient dimensions: (1) income inequality and (2) regional inequality. Both dimensions are important antecedent causes of European Union (EU) trust, the effects of which are mediated by evaluations of national institutions. On the micro-level, we suggest that inequality decreases a person's trust in national institutions and thereby diminishes the positive effect of national trust on EU trust. On the macro-level, inequality decreases country averages of trust in national institutions. This, however, informs an individual's trust in the EU positively, compensating for the seemingly untrustworthiness of national institutions. Finally, we propose that residing in an economically declining region can depress institutional trust. We find empirical support for our arguments by analysing regional temporal change over four waves of the European Social Survey 2010-2016 with a sample of 209 regions nested in 24 EU member states. We show that changes in a member state's regional inequality have similarly strong effects on trust as changes in the Gini coefficient of income inequality. Applying causal mediation techniques, we can show that the effects of inequality on EU trust are largely mediated through citizens' evaluations of national institutions. In contrast, residing in an economically declining region directly depresses EU trust, with economically lagging areas turning their back on European governance and resorting to the national level instead. Our findings highlight the relevance of regional inequality for refining our understanding of citizens' support for Europe's multi-level governance system and the advantages of causal modelling for the analysis of political preferences in a multi-level governance system.

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Section: Regional Inequality As An Antecedent Cause Of Trustmentioning

confidence: 99%

Regional inequality and institutional trust in Europe

Lipps¹,

Schraff²

2020

European J Political Res

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“…Whilst they were upheld as islands of constitutional stability and institutional maturity, both have seen the “political commanding heights captured by right-wing populism” ( Cumming et al, 2020 ); and it remains unclear as to how temporary Trump's reverse will prove. With this, there have been serious drives to abandon democracy (the US) and open-ended institutional change (Brexit) ( Cumming et al., 2020 ; O'Reilly et al, 2016 ; Sheppard, 2020 ).…”

Section: Theoretical Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

A very British state capitalism: Variegation, political connections and bailouts during the COVID-19 crisis

et al. 2022

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The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in governments playing increasingly prominent roles as active economic agents. However, state capitalism does not necessarily serve broad developmental purposes, and rather can be directed to supporting sectional and private interests. As the literature on variegated capitalism alerts us, governments and other actors regularly devise fixes in response to a systemic crisis, but the focus, scale, and scope of the interventions vary considerably, according to the constellation of interests. Rapid progress with vaccines notwithstanding, the UK government's response to COVID-19 has been associated with much controversy, not only because of an extraordinarily high death rate, but also because of allegations of cronyism around the granting of government contracts and bailouts. We focus on the latter, investigating more closely who got bailed out. We find that badly affected sectors (e.g. hospitality, transportation) and larger employers were more likely to get bailouts. However, the latter also favored the politically influential and those who had run up debt profligately. Although, as with state capitalism, crony capitalism is most often associated with emerging markets, we conclude that the two have coalesced into a peculiarly British variety, but one that has some common features with other major liberal markets. This might suggest that the eco-systemic dominance of the latter is coming to an end, or, at the least, that this model is drifting towards one that assumes many of the features commonly associated with developing nations.

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“…We now turn to another original contribution of the paper: a demonstration of how and why these and other popular imaginative geographies came to be used by citizens as they voted in the referendum. Froud et al (2016) have argued that national averages like Gross Domestic Product resonate little with citizens in a society characterised by uneven development and socio-economic polarisation. We see this in how MO panellists justified their vote for Remain or Leave.…”

Section: Where Is Britain?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These could be read as tales of an economy that fails to deliver decent wages and a welfare state struggling to deliver housing, education, and healthcare after years of austerity. Indeed, Warhurst (2016), among others, has criticised the Remain campaign for focusing not only on national averages, but also on what is threatened by Brexit (e.g., the national employment rate), as opposed to what is building resentment now (e.g., insecure and poorly paid jobs). Furthermore, the quotations in the previous paragraph could be taken as empirical support for Norris and Inglehart's (2019) theory of "cultural backlash" (against cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism), or Goodwin and Milazzo's (2017) argument that residents of areas undergoing fast ethnic change feel a "loss of control" (for more on Brexit, migration, and race, see Burrell et al, 2019).…”

Section: Where Is Britain?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Popular imaginative geographies and Brexit: Evidence from Mass Observation

Clarke

Moss

2021

Trans Inst British Geog

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The EU Referendum of 2016 was one of the most significant events in recent British political history. It is widely recognised that citizens engaged with the referendum through understandings of Britain, the EU, the world, and their place in it.This study complements existing research where such understandings have been inferred from citizens' demographic characteristics, the characteristics of their localities/regions, or elite discourses. It builds on existing research where a more direct engagement with citizens' understandings has been achieved through interviews or focus groups, allowing the content of understandings to be thickly described. To these latter studies, this paper makes three main contributions. First, it focuses on popular imaginative geographies, which are conceptualised drawing on literatures in Geography and Political Science as fast-thinking heuristics. Second, it brings new evidence to the conversation in the form of volunteer writing for Mass Observation. Third, the focus is on the content of popular imaginative geographies, but also how and why such geographies were used by voters in the referendum. The main findings include that many Leave supporters imagined Britain as an islandeither a once great military and imperial power, an island separate from Europe, needing freedom from Europe to engage in the wider world; or a small island, a full container, close to the rest of Europe and vulnerable to mobilities across Europe's borders. By contrast, many Remain supporters imagined Britain as post-imperial, small, vulnerable, and under threat of isolation from Europe and exposure to a chaotic, uncertain, dangerous world. Both groups engaged with the referendum through such popular imaginative geographies because the referendum presented voters with a difficult task, the campaigns provided few trustworthy facts, and voters therefore had to rely on cognitive shortcuts, including popular imaginative geographies.

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Cited by 23 publications

References 64 publications

Regional inequality and institutional trust in Europe

Regional inequality and institutional trust in Europe

A very British state capitalism: Variegation, political connections and bailouts during the COVID-19 crisis

Popular imaginative geographies and Brexit: Evidence from Mass Observation

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