Abstract:The result of the referendum in the United Kingdom in 2016 to leave the European Union sparked much interest on the socio-economic characteristics of 'Brexiters'. In this article we challenge the popularised view of the Leave voter as an outsider and find that individuals from an intermediate class, whose malaise is due to a declining financial position, represent an important segment of the Brexit vote. We use individual-level data from a post-Brexit survey based on the British Election Study. Our analysis tests three predictive models. First, although our analysis confirms the negative association between education and Leave vote, we find that voting Leave is associated more with intermediate levels of education than with low or absent education, in particular in the presence of a perceived declining economic position. Secondly, we find that Brexiters hold distinct psycho-social features of malaise due to declining economic conditions, rather than anxiety or anger. Thirdly, our exploratory model finds voting Leave associated with self-identification as middle class, rather than with working class. We also find that intermediate levels of income were not more likely to vote for remain than low income groups. Overall our analysis of the Brexit vote underlines the importance of considering the political behaviour of the declining middle.

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This article argues that focusing on intra-European inequalities is key to a deeper understanding of the Brexit process, as the impacts of the Brexit process on core–periphery inequalities within Europe and on intra-European migrations remain under-researched topics. Focusing on sociology, this article provides a critical analysis of the burgeoning literature on Brexit, highlighting the centrality of methodological nationalism and its critique by critical race scholars. We expand the latter’s critique, providing a different solution to the national framing of the debate. Drawing on world-system theory and post-Bourdieusian social theory, we explore the role that Britain played in legitimising core–periphery inequalities in Europe and social hierarchies between West and East, and North and South, European populations. We highlight the UK’s influence over EU supranational policies and its association, among non-UK EU citizens, with a ‘meritocracy narrative’ that shapes patterns and meanings of intra-European migration. We further explore how inequalities of nation, class, race and gender make EU citizens unequally positioned to access the promises of this narrative. Overall, the article argues that a focus on intra-European inequalities is essential to an understanding of how Britain contributed to the unequal Europe it aims to leave, and how EU citizens’ unequal migrations make Brexit an asymmetrical process.

The rising support for radical parties in Europe has triggered a new interest in the political sociology of voting and how voters with socio-economic insecurity are moving away from establishment politics. In this article, we apply Standing’s concept of ‘precarity’ to capture insecurity among ordinary voters and thereby expand the individual socio-economic explanations behind the vote for radical populist right (RPR) and radical left (RL) parties. We develop a multidimensional measure of precarity to capture subjective labour market insecurity in its different manifestations. The article examines the influence of precarity on voting in two countries – France and the Netherlands – that, in the 2017 elections, saw the culmination of a decline in support for establishment parties and a rise in support for both RPR and RL parties. We use panels of voters collected during these elections through online Voting Advice Applications, weighted against national census benchmarks. We identify and assess the role of two dimensions of precarity: ‘precarity of tenure’ and ‘precarity at work’. We find that in both France and the Netherlands precarity is, overall, negatively correlated with voting for established parties and positively correlated with voting for RPR and RL parties. Furthermore, our investigation shows that ‘precarity at work’ is more significant in explaining voting support than the more widely investigated ‘precarity of tenure’. Our results stress the importance of assessing how subjective work insecurity explains voting and support for RPR and RL parties.

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