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

Duncan Shaw, Chris M. Smith and Judy Scully

European Journal of Operational Research, 2017, vol. 263, issue 3, 1019-1032

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?’

Keywords: Brexit; Soft OR; Causal mapping; Longitudinal analysis; Secondary data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221717305155
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:ejores:v:263:y:2017:i:3:p:1019-1032

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2017.05.051

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati

More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().