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Brexit: The predictors of a district majority vote

In June 2016, the United Kingdom held its EU referendum, colloquially known as Brexit, in which the people of the island nation voted on whether their country should remain a member of or leave the European Union. This thesis investigates what economic variables may have lain behind the majority outcome of a given voting area (or district) and to what degree they may have impacted it. A logistic regression is conducted primarily on referendum and election data from the Electoral Commission, census data from the Office for National Statistics, and political leaning scores as quantified by the Manifesto Project. The resulting model, which exhibits a hit ratio of 92 percent correct predictions, shows that age, education, national identity, political leaning, irreligion, and unemployment have significant correlations with the majority Brexit outcome of a district. On the other hand, population, health, and income variables do not have statistically significant effects; however, poor health, on average, does seem to have a large positive effect on the odds when taking relative sample size into account.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-386045
Date January 2019
CreatorsMaconi, Stephen
PublisherUppsala universitet, Statistiska institutionen
Source SetsDiVA Archive at Upsalla University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeStudent thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text
Formatapplication/pdf
Rightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

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