• Interesting hypothesis...

    Did austerity cause Brexit? This paper shows that the rise of popular support
    for the UK Independence Party (UKIP), as the single most important
    correlate of the subsequent Leave vote in the 2016 European Union (EU) referendum,
    along with broader measures of political dissatisfaction, are strongly
    and causally associated with an individual’s or an area’s exposure to austerity
    since 2010. In addition to exploiting data from the population of all
    electoral contests in the UK since 2000, I leverage detailed individual level
    panel data allowing me to exploit within-individual variation in exposure to
    specific rules-based welfare reforms as well as broader measures of political
    preferences. The results suggest that the EU referendum could have resulted
    in a Remain victory had it not been for a range of austerity-induced welfare
    reforms. These reforms activated existing economic grievances. Further, auxiliary
    results suggest that the underlying economic grievances have broader
    origins than what the current literature on Brexit suggests. Up until 2010,
    the UK’s welfare state evened out growing income differences across the skill
    divide through transfer payments. This pattern markedly stops from 2010
    onwards as austerity started to bite

    https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cage/manage/publications/381-2018_fetzer.pdf

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