Prejudice and the Brexit vote: a tangled web

Abstract

The decision of the UK public in July 2016 to vote to leave the European Union was greeted with surprise within the UK and across the world. However, should we really have been surprised? Surveys of attitudes towards freedom of movement to the UK over the last 10 years have suggested an increasing negativity regarding immigration, and many debates before and after the vote have raised the issue of whether prejudice played a role in the outcome of the referendum. It is only within the last 12 months that a number of research study findings have started to provide a more coherent, data-informed evidence-base suggesting that voting behaviour in the referendum may have correlates to prejudice personality styles, nationalism, Islamophobia, and implicit/explicit prejudice. We argue that recent evidence suggests that levels of prejudice towards 'others' was a factor in the Brexit vote and that the attitudes underlying this vote must be explored in greater detail through cross-disciplinary scientific research, with legitimate concerns recognised and fallacies challenged.

‘This country is OURS’: The exclusionary potential of collective psychological ownership

“…We proceeded to examine whether the negative attitudinal consequences of ownership translate into a pro‐Brexit vote, thereby focusing on behaviour. Concerns about immigrants' negative impact on the British economy, culture, and welfare state were drivers of the pro‐Brexit vote (Goodwin & Milazzo, 2017; Hutchings & Sullivan, 2019). The vote is further explained by negative attitudes towards European integration, and specifically by cost and benefit concerns of the integration for employment, welfare, and freedom of movement (Vasilopoulou, 2016).…”

Re-examining the EU Referendum vote: right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation as indirect trait-level motivation

“…Analysis of the remain and leave campaigns and voters indicate that those who voted to leave the EU were much more likely than their remain-voting counterparts to emphasise xenophobic attitudes towards immigrants and the need to curtail immigration into the United Kingdom (Hobolt 2016). Given this and similar findings (e.g., Abrams and Travaglino 2018;Clarke et al 2017b;Goodwin and Milazzo 2017;Hutchings and Sullivan 2019), political and social psychologists have begun to look at how the Brexit vote is related to concepts such as Right-wing Authoritarianism (RWA) and Social Dominance Orientation (SDO). Those higher in right-wing authoritarianism favour ingroup unity and uniformity and are punitive toward those who violate their conceptions of what constitutes normative thought and behaviour (Altemeyer 1996).…”

Computational Social Choice and challenges оf voting in multi-agent systems

“…[38], [39] Manipulation vs. strategy-proof Strategic voting vs. nonmanipulable voting [40], [41] Privacy issues Voter privacy data protection [42] Different negative aspects of voter behaviour Biasfavouritism of some candidate(s) [43], [44] Prejudiceunfounded preconceptions [45] Briberycorrupt voting [46] The presence of paradoxes in Social Choice Theory Condorcet paradox (voting paradox) [47], [48] Arrow's paradox (Arrow's impossibility theorem) [26], [49] Gibbard-Satterthwaite impossibility theorem [50] Anonymity and neutrality…”