17:45 - 20:00
Friday-Panel
Chair/s:
Jane Green
Discussant/s:
Cassilde Schwartz
Meeting Room D

Marco Martini, Stefanie Walter
Learning from Precedent: How the British Brexit Experience Counteracts Nationalism outside the UK

Raluca L. Pahontu, Jane Green
Mind the Gap: Why Wealthy Voters Support Brexit

Maarja Lühiste, Jemima Repo
Divorcing the European Union? Examining the Use of Metaphors in Public Debate about Brexit

Nina Barzachka
Brexit, Critical Junctures, and Endogenous Institutional Change

Giorgio Malet, Stefanie Walter
When do voters learn from foreign experiences? Evidence from Brexit
Mind the Gap: Why Wealthy Voters Support Brexit
Raluca L. Pahontu 1, Jane Green 2
1 London School of Economics and Political Science
2 University of Oxford

Wealth provides a cushion against financial risk. We argue that wealth-based insurance can therefore alter status quo support beyond what a simple cost-benefit calculation would suggest. We test our theory in the case of Brexit, which has been widely characterized as a vote by economically left-behind voters. Our results show that individuals who preferred Brexit -- but who also lacked individual wealth -- are less likely to support leaving the EU. We corroborate our theory using two large independent surveys with similar wealth measures, accounting for unobserved individual level heterogeneity, and using a survey experiment. The findings have important implications for the role of wealth-as-insurance in electoral behavior, as well as for understanding the Brexit case.