Voting leave and the death penalty

[nightandthelight]

Very interesting read from the BBC regarding the link between voting leave and support for the death penalty. Contradicts the idea that leave voters were the disenfranchised poor.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-36803544

Also worth remembering that you can have correlation without causation...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation

for anyone wanting some amusement:
www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

or maybe the number of people who drowned by falling into a swimming pool really is intrinsically linked to the number of films Nicholas Cage appears in - every new film, people die!

akkakk over 24,000 people though ,you have a big enough sample size to smooth out the effects of the things you mention.

I was doing this quiz: www.celebritytypes.com/political-coordinates/test.php a few nights ago; it's hardly a giant leap to think that some areas of the political compass are more likely to vote Leave than others.

akkakk over 24,000 people though ,you have a big enough sample size to smooth out the effects of the things you mention.

however the stronger the apparent correlation, the stronger the statistical chance that other factors play an undetermined role; and therefore the stronger the apparent correlation, the stronger the chance that the correlation is less accurate than expected... - it is a normalising tendancy

equally, the ability for other factors to influence the way people say they would vote, is universal - i.e. the size of the sample is irrelevant... ultimately the stronger the potential perceived impact of an answer, the higher the chance that the person polled will hide their decision

so there could be an argument that with the question on the death penalty being seen as insignificant and the question on the referendum being seen as significant, the accuracy of the answers will tend away from accurate for the referendum question, and towards accurate for the death penalty question - meaning that the significance of the correlation can not be confirmed...

Why are you so rattled about this, akkakk?

The referendum result is known, this is simply one study. If you don't like the result of the study, just ignore it surely?

I am not trying to 'prove' anything by posting this nor present it as the absolute truth that no-one can argue with. I just thought it was interesting and showed an aspect of Brexit I hadn't considered before :)

I'm not at all surprised that there is a correlation between an authoritarian personality and brexiters. It is certainly true of all the people I know who voted leave.

Certainly goes with the attitude of the folk who voted leave in our local pub, which is the majority, out of the EU, death penalty, want to change immigration, mainly think people will have to go home.

Lets be fair there are obviously some very intelligent brexiteers, there are obviously those who knew exactly why and what they were voting for, just those who voted for a better time for the poor, or for immigrants going home were a bit dim.

Leave supporter, anti-authoritarian and anti-death penalty here.

Underparmummy
Rorty - seriously a moment, no sniping, why did you decide after 6 months of research? Was it just an anti EU decision or was it a pro an independent state decision? If it was the latter which bit of that did you find so attractive?

I recently binned all of the Brexit links in Bookmarks on my laptop so this will have to be from memory so figures are approximate.

Was it an anti EU decision or was it a pro an independent state decision? I suppose a bit of both.

UK's GDP from export to EU is less than 10% and 95% of UK firms do not export to the EU at all. Nevertheless 100% of our trade is subject to EU regulation. Seems crazy to me.

Despite the billions of pounds we pay into the EU, our influence is small and declining. Can't remember our votes in the council of ministers but its less than 10%.

EU's share of world GDP is declining. It has gone from 30% in 1980s to 20% today and still going down.

Approx 30 countries outside the EU have trade agreements with it without necessitating them joining. So why can't we?

The UK has no need to be part of the EU to be member of bodies such as NATO, UN, WTO, OECD, G5, G8, etc.

I hope our fishermen will be free to fish unhindered in our own waters.

I was not impressed to learn that the EU's audit had not been signed off for several years.

Merkel was massively wrong to open up EU borders to mass influx of refugees/economic migrants. I believe we should welcome those with the skills we need who wish to work and live here but we should maintain control of our borders. I also agreed with Cameron's decision to bring here families from the Syrian refugee camps.

There was a hell of a lot more and the above only covers a small percentage of the information I read. Each point will no doubt be picked to shreds by Remainers but meh.

winter

As has been said several times now on this thread, the study did not conclude that every leave voter supports the death penalty. Just that there was a strong correlation in statistical terms.

OP I agree it's interesting. I think it's a shame people are so spectacularly missing that point on this thread.

" 95% of UK firms do not export to the EU at all."

Well that would be true, but as 76% of those businesses are employ ONE person, the owner, we wouldn't expect them to would we?

"Despite the billions of pounds we pay into the EU, our influence is small and declining. Can't remember our votes in the council of ministers but its less than 10%."

The UK vote in the EU council is 8%, far higher than it is for other countries, more than double what it would be if votes were shared equally. So other countries have to lose influence to give the UK a larger vote.

The UK paid about 13 Billion net to an EU budget of 143 million euros, which basically accounts of just less than 10% but we pay in less than Germany, France and Italy.

"EU's share of world GDP is declining. It has gone from 30% in 1980s to 20% today and still going down"

Europe's share of world GDP is falling because the scale of word GDP has increased since 1980 (he year you get this figure from cause Daniel Hannan used it) for example the UK's GDP in 1980 was double that of China despite having 17 times the population of the UK. Now given that economies like this India and Brazil have increased rapidly this period of time they have contributed a far larger level to world GDP than before.

However, in nominal and real terms the EU GDP has got bigger, so we have a smaller % of the pie, but as the pie got a lot bigger, we still have more pie than we did in 1980. The EU is not declining.

If you want control of the fishing, ask the government or the member for the Fisheries policy that turned up to 1 out of 40 meetings in his time on on it.

The 30 other countries do not have the same deal that we do, even the Swiss don't even have a full free trade deal like we would need to continue to the same level,

I'm not going on picking your points to pieces, but you can vote on what you like, it doesn't mean that the reasons you have given are correct.

Why are you so rattled about this, akkakk?

Not rattled in the slightest, this is a forum - on forums people have discussions - in discussions, people have different perspectives to bring...

the OP posted a link to an interesting correlation being made - the point I was making is that correlation can a) be totally coincidental b) may not be causational and c) can be skewed by the psychology of how people answer polls - esp. way before the event being studied...

so on that basis, while there may appear to be a correlation, in fact you can't be sure that there is any link at all...

It's a correlation of political opinion - so it is a bit more relevant than the correlation between Nick Cage films and drownings. I own that meaningless correlations book too - it's very funny.

You mean Akkak didn't come up with that herself? Disappointing.

Its true there is more correlation becuase the same people who said they were likely to vote leave ALSO said that they approved of the death penalty. Both are political opinions so they will bear more correlation especially as the opposing was also true.

Spurious Correlations - For your delectation, Smallfox

Of course, we can still draw non-spurious conclusions from correlations too.

to be fair I did link to the website before quoting from it!
It is a very good and amusing understanding of how statistics can be misused...

yes, we can draw non-spurious conclusions from correlations, but extra understanding of the facts are needed before that can be done - and when it is simply a couple of questions on a poll, and maybe no work has been done on understanding the underlying accuracy of the poll, then you have to take it with a pinch-of-salt...

I don't see that anyone has drawn much by way of conclusions. Leave voters tend to be less progressive than remainers, and this correlation was stronger than socio-economic status in voting intention. That's pretty much it, and pretty unarguable until someone comes up with another survey demonstrating the opposite.

But it seems highly unlikely, particularly as progressive attitudes are strongly associated with higher levels of education which as we know from other polls was a very strong predictor of voting intention.

Leave voters tend to be less progressive than remainers

It depends how you define progressive. Personally I see the EU as a project from the early 20th century, sticking to its aims despite their failings. It's the creators and entrepeneurs, rather than the turgid corporate lobbyists of Brussels, who will move Britain onwards in a far more streamlined way.

As has been said several times now on this thread, the study did not conclude that every leave voter supports the death penalty.

Where did I say it did?