Thread by @Helenreflects

Short thread (promise!) I finally found the answer to why @UKLabour attracted so many Remain voters in the 2017 GE in spite of their official Leave policy (which they haven't changed), and why the @LibDems failed to capitalise on their Remain stance 1/

I have evidence, from a hardcore pro-Remain group (the 48% FB group) that committed Remainers supported Labour in the last GE with more than 50% - they flocked to Labour in droves, see here: blog.politicsmeanspolitics.com/why-did-commit… 2/

The answer is: Remain voters who were particularly disillusioned and disappointed by the EU Ref result became more left wing after the Referendum, as a result of their disappointment. See this article: journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117… 3/

Key findings: Already before the EU Ref, it's unsurprising that people intending to vote Remain were more left-wing than those intending to vote Leave: "Remain supporters were overall liberal (M=2.97, SD=1.25) and leave supporters were more conservative (M=4.23, SD=1.65) 4/

These are means (M) and standard deviations on a scale that measures how left-wing you are, e.g., people who say that benefits disincentivize people to find work tend to be more right-wing. 5/

Here's the interesting thing though: Remain voters who were more disappointed, became more left-wing after EU Ref "These findings suggest that the
disillusionment experienced by those who supported remain
may have led them to express more liberal/left-wing views" 6/

They found a similar result among Americans who supported Clinton. More disappointed with Trump became more left-wing post-election of Trump. And they also found it through experimentally inducing disappointment 7/

In the experimental study, they asked participants to think of something that made them disillusioned in the world. Those participants reported, compared to a control group, more political activism and more polarised views 8/

The authors of the study (Maher et al) speculate it might be that disillusion leads people to seek meaning. That meaning-seeking translates itself into political activism and into more extreme political views. 9/

Hence, Remain voters were attracted by a left-wing programme "for the many, not the few", even though the programme is not realisable with Brexit. There won't be money to do it. By contrast, the LibDems had a more centrist programme... 10/

Now such a centrist programme was attractive in Macron's France, where the left had not suffered a major disillusion. But in the UK, Labour managed to attract Labour voters with their manifesto which was unabashedly left-wing (my survey among Remainers supports this) /ends