1066 and all that: Some deep determinants of voting shares in the 2016 referendum on EU membership

Abstract

Recent evidence from UK opinion surveys suggests that inhabitants of areas where there is a high density of universities have opinions that are significantly more liberal with regard to immigration and minority rights; this effect is robust to controlling for the individual's own age and education level, suggesting that university towns have a distinctive culture. Moreover, variation in the density of universities is explained partly by variation in the density of earlier educational institutions, and the variation in the density of these earlier institutions is associated with medieval exposure to religious and ethnic diversity. Support for EU membership is known to be correlated with liberalism, and this paper shows that patterns of voting in the 2016 referendum are also associated with the density of universities and earlier educational institutions, and with medieval exposure to religious and ethnic diversity.