Who voted for Brexit? A comprehensive district-level analysis

We find that exposure to the EU in terms of immigration and trade pro- vides relatively little explanatory power for the referendum vote. Instead, we find that fundamental characteristics of the voting population were key drivers of the Vote Leave share, in particular their education profiles, their historical dependence on manufacturing employment as well as low income and high unemployment. At the much finer level of wards within cities, we find that areas with deprivation in terms of education, income and employment were more likely to vote Leave. Our results in- dicate that a higher turnout of younger voters, who were more likely to vote Remain, would not have overturned the referendum result. We also compare our UK results to voting patterns for the far-right leader Marine Le Pen in the 2017 French presiden- tial election. We find similar factors driving the French vote. An out-of-sample pre- diction of the French vote using UK estimates performs reasonably well.