Why did Brexit happen? Using causal mapping to analyse secondary, longitudinal data

Abstract

The outcome of the UK's referendum on whether the UK should leave or remain in the European Union (so-called Brexit) came as a jolt to many across Europe. In this paper, we use causal mapping from soft OR to analyse longitudinal data from nine televised Brexit debates spread across the 4 weeks leading up to the referendum. We analyse these causal maps to build one view on why Brexit happened. The maps are analysed for the breadth, depth and consistency of arguments in the debate and, broadly, finds that the Leave campaign focused more consistently on a smaller set of campaign themes, contributed more detail to those themes, and focused on their own core issues rather than being diverted onto Remain strongholds. In contrast, Remain shared more information but across a broader range of themes (meaning they were less consistent), and followed Leave into themes that were clearly not their core battleground. The novelties for soft OR in this paper include: the difficulties of building and validating causal maps from secondary data; new techniques for analysing a group of causal maps to uncover the properties of arguments that spread longitudinally through a campaign; a methodology for a teaching case using publicly availability data; linking the paper, philosophically, to critical realism given the unique dataset. Finally, we identify differences in the Leave and Remain debate campaigns to offer one answer to the question 'Why did Brexit happen?'.

Was Brexit triggered by the old and unhappy? Or by financial feelings?

“…The paper builds upon a growing literature. Important contributions, many of which may be seen eventually as seminal, have been made by scholars such as Shaw, Smith and Scully (2017), Clarke, Goodwin and Whiteley (2017), Becker, Fetzer and Novy (2017), Dorling (2016), Goodwin and Milazzo (2017), Goodwin and Heath (2016), Heath and Goodwin (2017), and Hobolt (2016). We confirm some of these articles' early conclusions, such as the likelihood of highly-educated citizens favouring Remain.…”

The Roles of Referendums in Deliberative Systems

“…The systemic analysis, by contrast, suggests also looking at the degree to which Leave's claims were redeemed by reference to widely-shared narratives about lived experience, and sure enough, we have empirical evidence that this was the case. Shaw, Smith, and Scully (2017) show that the Remain campaign (a) spent most of its time responding to themes determined by Leave and thus allowed Leave to set the agenda; and (b) spoke in the language of analysts and experts. Leave demonstrated active listening, one of the things that Bächtiger and Parkinson (2019) claim gives democracy a deliberative character.…”

Knowledge Acquisition Using Group Support Systems

“…It may therefore be important to visually map the intersubjectvity of experts and so can recognize conflict as well as commonalities in understandings (Eden et al 1981). A proven technique for mapping intersubjectvity is a causal mapping technique Bryson et al 2004;Shaw et al 2017). A causal map serves as a 'boundary object' for group completion-an object that is "… shared and shareable across different problem solving contexts" (Carlile 2002(Carlile , 2004.…”