Brexit: Tracking and disentangling the sentiment towards leaving the EU

Miguel de Carvalho and Gabriel Martos

International Journal of Forecasting, 2020, vol. 36, issue 3, 1128-1137

Abstract: On 23 June, 2016, the UK held a referendum to decide whether to stay in the European Union or leave. The uncertainty surrounding the outcome of this referendum had major consequences for public policy, investment decisions, and currency markets. We discuss some of the subtleties involved in smoothing and disentangling poll data in light of the problem of tracking the dynamics of the intention to Brexit, and propose a multivariate singular spectrum analysis method that produces trendlines on the unit simplex. The trendline yield via multivariate singular spectrum analysis is shown to resemble that of local polynomial smoothing, and singular spectrum analysis presents the nice feature of disentangling the dynamics directly into components that can be interpreted as changes in public opinion or sampling error. The merits and disadvantages of some different approaches for obtaining smooth trendlines on the unit simplex are contrasted, in terms of both local polynomial smoothing and multivariate singular spectrum analysis.

Keywords: European union politics; Local polynomial regression; Smoothing; Tracking public opinion; Multivariate singular spectrum analysis; UK’s EU referendum; Unit simplex (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:intfor:v:36:y:2020:i:3:p:1128-1137

DOI: 10.1016/j.ijforecast.2018.07.002

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