I argued
at the end of last year that immigration was an attractive issue for
the right, because it offered the possibility of capturing votes from
those who would vote left on economic grounds, but who were also
socially conservative. It was particularly attractive if you could
convince leftish social conservatives that voting to reduce
immigration would improve their economic situation. The EU referendum
vote exemplified how successful that strategy could be. The socially
conservative vote went to Leave, irrespective of where those voters
were on a left right spectrum (see here).
In this situation,
it is understandable that a lot of focus goes to the left/social
conservative voters. As voting left clearly correlates with income
and areas of social deprivation more generally, we get stories about
the economically left behind Leavers. At the same time, some social
scientists object, saying that voting Leave clearly correlates with
socially conservative views, like hanging for example. There seems to
be a contradiction here, but there is not. As I argued here,
it is the fight over whether left social conservatives vote on
economics or on their social views that swings these votes. The same
point could be made for the US as the UK, particularly if we add in
race as an issue.
Those controlling
right wing media understand all this. Another post
from last year looked at how economists had shown clear evidence that
Fox news was not in the business of reflecting their viewers beliefs
and voting patterns, but in moulding them. They did this by looking
at what economists call natural experiments: events that in this case
influenced whether people watched Fox that had nothing to do with
their politics. Over Wren-Lewis Christmas we were talking about
whether there were any natural experiments for assessing the
influence of the Mail or Sun in the UK. One possibility we discussed
was whether the Liverpool boycott
of the Sun over Hillsborough might be a useful natural experiment.
I then read this
twitter
thread from @marwood_lennox.
They first note the clear correlation between measures of deprivation
by constituencies and votes in the 2017 general election. They then show the
imputed EU referendum vote against measure of deprivation: apart from
the least deprived areas voting to Remain, there is no clear
correlation. So far much as we would expect from the analysis above.
But it was these two tweets that really caught my attention:
“Deprivation
doesn't clearly correlate with strength for Remain either. There are
eight >60% Remain seats in most deprived decile …. Two of those
eight are in very white working class Liverpool. What happened
there?”
Is this the ‘natural
experiment’ of Sun readership at work?
If only social
science was this easy. There are, unfortunately, plenty of other
explanations. First, cities tended to vote Remain, it was the
towns that did not. Liverpool’s Remain vote was not that different
from Manchester. True Manchester has less acute deprivation, but if
deprivation and voting Leave are uncorrelated, so what? One reason that cities
voted remain is that they have large universities.
Furthermore, as a
result of twitter (thanks everyone), I learnt that the local papers
had made much of EU funding for the docks and elsewhere. There is
also a legacy of Irish immigration. Liverpool has a strong
international tradition based on its port and football club, recently
reinforced by being a European city of culture. Thus plenty of other
reasons why Liverpool might be unusually Remain, if that is what they
were.
Despite all this, I
have learnt from experience not to let such difficulties get in the
way of a potentially interesting result. So I would be very
interested if by chance anyone who did proper multivariate analysis
of the Leave vote is reading this, and noticed that Liverpool constituencies were, or were
not, unusually Remain (given age, education etc). Or if anyone else
has any ideas about natural experiments that might affect recent
newspaper readership.
