Cognitive ability and voting behaviour in the 2016 UK referendum on European Union membership

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Abstract

On June 23rd 2016 the UK voted to leave the European Union. The period leading up to the referendum was characterized by a significant volume of misinformation and disinformation. Existing literature has established the importance of cognitive ability in processing and discounting (mis/dis) information in decision making. We use a dataset of couples within households from a nationally representative UK survey to investigate the relationship between cognitive ability and the propensity to vote Leave / Remain in the 2016 UK referendum on European Union membership. We find that a one standard deviation increase in cognitive ability, all else being equal, increases the likelihood of a Remain vote by 9.7%. Similarly, we find that an increase in partner’s cognitive ability further increases the respondent’s likelihood of a Remain vote (7.6%). In a final test, restricting our analysis to couples who voted in a conflicting manner, we find that having a cognitive ability advantage over one’s partner increases the likelihood of voting Remain (10.9%). An important question then becomes how to improve individual and household decision making in the face of increasing amounts of (mis/dis) information.
Original languageEnglish
Article numbere0289312
JournalPLoS ONE
Volume18
Issue number11
Early online date22 Nov 2023
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 30 Nov 2023

Bibliographical note

Data Availability: The data underlying the results presented in the study are available from https://beta.ukdataservice.ac.uk/datacatalogue/series/series?id=2000053#!/access-data and can be found within the Access Data dropdown menu with the following title: 6614 Understanding Society: Waves 1-12, 2009-2021 and Harmonised BHPS: Waves 1-18, 1991-2009. Our complete analysis scripts and code book have been posted at the Open Science Framework (OSF): https://osf.io/3yn2b/.

Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.

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