A spatial analysis of the Brexit vote in the West Midlands

Abstract

Recent votes for populist parties and policies have been a focus for an increasingly significant body of academic research. In the UK this has particularly focused research on the drivers of the vote to leave the European Union (Brexit) in 2016. In spite of a growing body of work on the subject, the literature investigating the applicability of spatial econometric methods is surprisingly thin. This paper applies such methods to hitherto unused data for the West Midlands region, where we have an unusually rich set of small-area results. The work finds substantial spatial autocorrelation even after demographic differences are accounted for. Whilst focusing on a particular region, the rise of populism globally gives these findings a wider salience.