New Findings on Key Factors Influencing the UK’s Referendum on Leaving the EU

Aihua Zhang

World Development, 2018, vol. 102, issue C, 304-314

Abstract: The UK’s EU in/out referendum raised significant debate and speculation of the intention of the electorate and its motivations in voting; much of this debate was informed by simple data analysis examining individual factors, in isolation, and using opinion polling data. This, in the case of the EU referendum where multiple factors influence the decision simultaneously, failed to predict the eventual outcome. On June 23, 2016, Britain’s vote to leave the EU came as a surprise to most observers, with a bigger voter turnout than that of any UK general election in the past decade. In this research, we apply multivariate regression analysis and a Logit Model to real voting data to identify statistically significant factors influencing the EU referendum voting preference simultaneously as well as the odd ratio in favor of Leave. Visualizations of the key findings are also provided with heat maps and graphs.

Keywords: EU referendum; turnout; higher education; multivariate regression; Logit Model; odds ratio (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:wdevel:v:102:y:2018:i:c:p:304-314

DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2017.07.017

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