Forthcoming in PS: Political Science & Politics
Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij, Department of Philosophy, Birkbeck, University of London, UK William L. Allen, Department of Politics and International Relations, and Nuffield College, University of Oxford, UK
Abstract: Since the UK’s 2016 referendum on EU membership, politicians on both sides of the debate have invoked the "will of the people" either to claim the matter is settled or to justify further confirmatory action. Building on prior information effects research in political science, we argue that the extent to which voters are informed about politically relevant issues is a key factor in evaluating whether any particular result accurately reflects an electorate’s collective "will." By applying counterfactual modeling to British Election Study data collected after the referendum (N=2,067), we estimate that support for leaving the EU would have dropped by up to 10 percentage points, had voters been more fully informed. More generally, we suggest that such modeling exercises—accompanied by transparent theoretical assumptions to enable stress-testing under different conditions—provide diagnostic tools for assessing the sensitivity of electoral outcomes to varying levels of information, and therefore offer relevant insight as to whether they truly capture the "will of the people."
Keywords: Brexit, counterfactual models, information effects, political knowledge