As we like it: did the UK’s 2016 EU referendum reveal the “Will of the People?”

Ahlstrom-Vij, Kristoffer and Allen, W. (2023) As we like it: did the UK’s 2016 EU referendum reveal the “Will of the People?”. PS: Political Science and Politics , ISSN 1049-0965.

Abstract

Since the UK’s 2016 referendum on EU membership, politicians on both sides of the debate have repeatedly invoked the “will of the people,” either to claim that the matter is settled or to justify the need for subsequent confirmatory action. Following a long tradition of information effects research in political science, we argue that the extent to which voters are informed about politically relevant issues is a key factor in evaluating whether any given result accurately reflects an electorate’s collective “will.” By using counterfactual modeling applied to British Election Study data, we estimate that support for leaving the EU would have dropped by 7-10 percentage points, had voters been more fully informed. More generally, in the context of relatively infrequent referenda, we suggest that such models can usefully indicate the sensitivity of outcomes to different levels of information, and allow legislators to gauge the extent to which a given outcome likely reflects voters’ collective will.

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