Mind the Gap: Why Wealthy Voters Support Brexit

Jane Green and Raluca L. Pahontu

British Journal of Political Science, 2024, vol. 54, issue 4, 1067-1087

Abstract: Wealth provides self-insurance against financial risk, reducing risk aversion. We apply this insurance mechanism to electoral behaviour, arguing that a voter who desires a change to the status quo and who is wealthy is more likely to vote for change than a voter who lacks the same self-insurance. We apply this argument to the case of Brexit in the UK, which has been widely characterized as a vote by the ‘economically left-behind’. Our results show that individuals who lacked wealth are less likely to support leaving the EU, explaining why so many Brexit voters were wealthy, in terms of their property wealth. We corroborate our theory using two panel surveys, accounting for unobserved individual-level heterogeneity, and by using a survey experiment. The findings have implications for the potential broader role of wealth-as-insurance in electoral behaviour and for understanding the Brexit case.

Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:bjposi:v:54:y:2024:i:4:p:1067-1087_3

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in British Journal of Political Science from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().