Ethnic Minority Voters in 2019: Brexitland, or Business as Usual, 2020

The motivation for the study was that there has not been an in-depth investigation into the views of ethnic minority voters in Britain since the 2010 Ethnic Minority British Election Study, despite the fact that almost one in ten voters in Britain comes from an ethnic minority background. This means that existing accounts of political change, including of the EU referendum, and subsequent national political changes, pay insufficient attention to the political choices of ethnic minorities, and both academic and political understanding of the effects of Brexit on subsequent vote choice is so far patchy and incomplete. Moreover, existing survey questions that are used to study political attitudes may be insufficient to capture the views of ethnic minority respondents. For example, survey questions that ask generally about immigration may be more difficult to give a overall answer to for respondents who have family experience of migration, compared to question which ask about different types of immigration. We designed the interviews to provide information that will be generative in designing future survey question on the political and social views of ethnic minorities. Thus the aims of the study were firstly to provide new evidence about the range of views that ethnic minority voters hold about political events since 2016, and also to guide the development of future fieldwork in this area. This was achieved through semi-structured interviews that were conducted over the phone from April to July 2020. The topic guide contained questions on: whether the respondent voted in the 2019 UK general election, and if so who for; the main reasons for their vote; key campaign issues; race and discrimination in politics; views on parties and leaders; the 2016 referendum; and whether Brexit was an important part of respondent’s identity. Respondents were given an incentive payment of £40 in vouchers.

Almost one in ten voters in Britain comes from an ethnic minority background. However, existing accounts of political change pay insufficient attention to the political choices of ethnic minorities, and both academic and political understanding of the effects of Brexit on subsequent vote choice is so far patchy and incomplete. The principal reason for this is that conducting a representative quantitative study of ethnic minorities exceeds the usual ESRC standard grant funding limits. We propose to conduct 90 semi-structured interviews with ethnic minority respondents of Understanding Society to explore the varying effects of the EU referendum, and subsequent national political changes on the political choices of ethnic minorities. We will then triangulate this 'thick' data from interviews, with representative 'thin' quantitative data from the Understanding Society on the vote choices of ethnic minorities in the Brexit referendum, and elections in 2017 and 2019. We will collaborate with the ESRC investment project Understanding Society as an Associated Study. Using respondents embedded in the household panel study is ideal - the panel contains a great deal of information on respondents' political choices back to 2010, allowing us to purposively sample potential interviewees according to their politics (e.g. to achieve equal numbers of Remain and Leave supporters), and also to supplement the qualitative data with other information about their household and personal history. In accordance with Understanding Society requirements we will deposit the transcriptions from interviews for secondary analysis.

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