An unconsidered leave? Inequality aversion and the Brexit referendum

This paper examines a behavioural explanation for the Brexit referendum result, namely the role of an individual’s inequality aversion (IA). We study whether the referendum result was an “unconsidered Leave” out of people’s low aversion to inequality. We use a representative sample of the UK population fielded in 2017, and analyse the extent to which lottery-based individual IA estimates predict their Brexit vote. We consider alternative potential drivers of IA in both income and health domains; these include risk aversion, alongside socio-economic and demographic characteristics. A greater aversion to income inequality predicts a lower probability of voting for Leave, even when controlling for risk aversion and other drivers of the Brexit vote. However, this effect is only true among men, for whom an increase in income IA by one standard deviation decreases their likelihood of voting for leaving the EU by 5 percentage points which would have reduced the probability of a leave vote, resulting in an overall remain majority in our sample. However, the effect of health inequality aversion is not significantly different from zero.