Attitudes Towards Brexit, 2017-2020

Hobolt, Sara (2021). Attitudes Towards Brexit, 2017-2020. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-854869

In the referendum on 23 June 2016 voters gave the British government a mandate for Britain to be the first country to ever leave the EU. Yet, the options of 'leave' or 'remain' do not give clear guidance as to what kind of Brexit people want or will accept. At the heart of this research project is a question of huge importance to policy-makers: which negotiation outcomes will be considered legitimate by the British public?
The negotiations ahead involve an array of complex policy questions, including the much debated trade-off over whether the government should prioritise controlling the inflow of EU immigrants or preferential trade agreements with the EU. But there are many other policy choices that relate to EU budget contributions, EU subsidies, financial services, jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice and so on. None of these featured on the referendum ballot, nor are they issues that most people gave much thought to in advance of the referendum. This project therefore aims to shed light on the question of what the Prime Minister's repeated dictum - 'Brexit Means Brexit' - actually means to ordinary people. What expectations do voters, both Leavers and Remainers, have of Brexit, what process do they want the negotiations to take and ultimately what outcome do they want?
We also aim to advance our broader knowledge of how people form policy attitudes. Alongside self-interest, the dominant explanation of attitude formation is that people rely on informational short-cuts, typically cues from political parties. But the EU referendum is a situation in which the two largest parties - Labour and the Conservatives - were openly split internally before the vote and are still divided on the nature of Brexit. We argue that people are also responsive to other cues. These are both social and political in nature. The former are cues about what other types of people in similar social groups think. The latter are based around political divisions based on new opinion based groups formed around the distinction between Leavers and Remainers.
Our aim is to thus gather new information on people's views about the Brexit negotiations, but also shed light on what types of social and political cues shape these opinions. In close collaboration with the 'UK in a Changing Europe' programme, we will disseminate information on people's expectations of Brexit by focusing on three crucial questions: What, Why and With What Consequence.
i) What do people expect of Brexit, what process do they want the negotiations to take and what are their preferred outcomes? ii) Why, and how, do people arrive at positions on these complex policy issues? iii) What are the consequences of these expectations and preferences for the negotiation positions of policy-makers and the legitimacy of the Brexit outcome?
To address these three core questions, we make use of state-of-the-art survey and experimental methods in collaboration with YouGov, a leading online polling company. These methods include 1) conjoint analysis, an innovative experimental design that enables us to determine how people value different features of complex Brexit trade-offs; 2) survey experiments that allow us to causally examine how different in-group cues affect opinions, and 3) a three-wave survey panel, with an oversample of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, that allows us to study the dynamics of public opinion over the course of the Brexit negotiations, as well as heterogeneity in opinions by social group and national identity.
We aim to contribute to the public debate on Brexit, through a series of on-going public events, briefings, blog posts and media appearances, and also contribute to the scholarly debate on how citizens form opinions on complex policy issues.

Data description (abstract)

Survey data on public attitudes towards Brexit in the United Kingdom from 2017-2020. 10-wave survey tracker data on how attitudes towards Brexit developed in the aftermath of the 2016 Brexit referendum, including questions on identification as "Leavers" and "Remainers", consequences of Brexit for the country and the individual, as well as the government's handling of Brexit.
Respondents in each wave of the tracker are a nationally-representative sample of the British adult population. The 10 tracker surveys were conducted between 25 April 2017- 10 January 2020.
The surveys were conducted by YouGov.

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