Researchers bid to map Wales’ hidden Brexit voting patterns

Mark Mansfield

Researchers are appealing to campaigners and political activists to help uncover the hidden local voting patterns in Wales behind the Brexit referendum.

A decade after the UK voted to leave the European Union, academics at Aberystwyth University are attempting to build what they say could become the most detailed map yet of how communities voted in the historic 2016 poll.

The project is seeking unofficial tallies known as “boxcounts” — rough vote estimates often recorded by campaigners and observers as ballot boxes were opened on referendum night before the formal count began.

Official referendum results were only published at local authority level, masking how individual neighbourhoods, towns and suburbs voted.

Researchers say the boxcounts could reveal much more detailed patterns, including whether city centres voted differently from surrounding suburbs, how rural communities compared with nearby towns, and where support for Leave or Remain was strongest at neighbourhood level.

The study is being led by Professor Michael Woods at the university’s Centre for Welsh Politics and Society.

“The EU referendum was the defining event in recent British politics and has shaped our political landscape for the last decade,” he said.

“We often talk about ‘Leave areas’ and ‘Remain areas’, but we don’t really know how communities voted beneath the level of local authorities.

“By bringing together boxcounts from across the UK, we can build a much more detailed picture of where support for Brexit was strongest, where it was weakest, and how these patterns relate to different types of places.”

Because the boxcounts were unofficial, no central archive exists.

Professor Woods said many records could still be stored on personal computers or in old campaign files.

“As boxcounts from the referendum are unofficial no one has collected them together, but they will still be saved on people’s computers or archived in old campaign folders,” he said.

“We’re urging anyone who recorded or collated them to dig them out and send them to us.”

Safeguards

The research team said safeguards were in place to ensure privacy requirements were met and that methods had been developed to identify and correct potential bias in the data.

The work forms part of a wider project titled Rural Discontent, Spatial Justice and Disruptive Politics, which is examining links between rural discontent and the rise of populist and disruptive politics internationally.