One consequence of the EU-referendum’s pro-Brexit outcome was a renewed call for Scottish independence. Supporting this call can be construed as a form of collective action Scots may engage in. However, Scots may also consider individual mobility strategies including - in extreme cases - emigration. The current research investigated how identity-dynamics relate to these identity management strategies in post-referendum Scotland. We found a positive association between perceiving the EU-referendum as having violated expectations and considering individual mobility responses, mediated by identity subversion (i.e., the perception that the referendum results fundamentally changed the UK’s identity). Furthermore, we found that perceiving the EU-referendum as having violated expectations was related to higher collective action intentions, mediated by disidentification from UK citizens. Taken together, these findings underscore the pervasive role social identity processes play in shaping political decisions and individual behaviour.
In the referendum in June 2016, the citizens of the United Kingdom (UK) had the possibility to decide whether their country should remain in or leave the European Union (EU). Overall, 51.9% voted to leave the EU, but the referendum outcome differed markedly between the constituent countries within the UK. One consequence of the EU-referendum’s outcome was a renewed call for Scottish independence. A second consequence was a marked increase in the number of people who emigrated from the UK to, or were granted citizenship in, another country within the EU.
Supporting a second referendum for Scottish independence is an action that aims at changing the position of a group as a whole (i.e., reflects collective action). Emigrating from the UK, in turn, represents an individual response that only changes one’s own situation (i.e., reflects individual mobility). In the present study, we investigated psychological processes that could underly these reactions to the EU-referendum. Specifically, we focused on how Scots’ perceptions of the referendum process relate to (a) their perceptions of the UK as a whole and (b) how they feel about being UK-citizens. Moreover, we investigated how these aspects relate to considering emigration and supporting a new campaign for Scottish independence.
We conducted a survey with 202 respondents living in Scotland. We assessed how respondents perceived the EU-referendum process, whether they had the impression that the UK had fundamentally changed due to the referendum outcome, how they felt about being a citizen of the UK, and to what extent they considered emigration and supporting a new independence campaign. Our results show that the more Scots perceived the referendum process as having violated their expectations of political processes in the UK, the more likely they were to consider emigration and the more they intended to support a campaign in favour of Scottish independence. Furthermore, our results suggest that the impression that the UK as a whole has changed underlies the relation between perceptions of the referendum process as having violated expectations and emigration considerations, whereas feeling negatively about being a UK-citizen underlies the relation between perceptions of the referendum process as having violated expectations and support for Scottish independence.
The present study suggests that three factors need to be considered when trying to understand how people react to geo-political events. The first is how they perceive the processes related to this event. If these processes are perceived as violating expectations, intentions to leave the country or to support separatist movements may be more pronounced. For policy makers seeking to avoid these reactions, this means that they should prevent their behaviours from being perceived as violating expectations. The second and third factor that need to be considered are an individual’s perception of the group they live in and their personal relation to this group. This suggests that identity-related dynamics may not only shape voting behaviour, but political processes more broadly.
On June 23, 2016, the citizens of the United Kingdom (UK) had the possibility to decide whether their country should remain in or leave the European Union (EU). Overall, 51.9% voted to leave the EU (
But why should Brexit impact people’s views on Scottish independence? And why should it motivate them to emigrate? While political and economic reasons undoubtedly play a major role, herein we will focus on a psychological aspect of the post-referendum situation in the UK: the identity-related dynamics involved. Specifically, we will study Scots as a group within the UK and explore the relation between these identity dynamics and the reactions Scots consider.
In this endeavour, we will focus on perceptions of identity subversion and disidentification from the citizens of the UK. Moreover, we will test how these are related to two types of identity management strategies: individual mobility (i.e., considering emigration) and collective action (i.e., intentions to support a new Scottish independence campaign). Thereby, we strive to shed light on the correlates of group members’ consideration of different identity management strategies in an intriguing setting - one in which individuals are faced with a highly impactful, yet controversial geopolitical decision. To this end, we will address two aspects in our introduction.
First, we will summarize research we deem relevant to the current case on group schisms (e.g.,
Second, we will apply the predictions derived from these fields of research to Scots’ situation after the EU-referendum. Thereby, we seek to extend the current psychological research on Brexit, which to date has primarily focused on the (often identity-related) antecedents of people’s decision to vote in favour of or against leaving the EU (e.g.,
Groups strongly influence their members by defining what attitudes they hold, which values are important to them, and how they behave (e.g.,
More specifically, schism research assumes that changes occurring or decisions being made within a group are monitored concerning their fit to group members’ expectations (e.g.,
In accordance with schism research, research on social identity management strategies (e.g.,
The EU-referendum can be construed as a particularly intriguing example of an event being evaluated concerning its fit with expectations. However, the norms that are most influential in determining these expectations may vary between individuals (even though group norms are usually shared between group members;
Hypothesis 1: Evaluating the EU-referendum process as violating expectations should be positively related to individual mobility considerations (i.e., considering emigration from the UK), and perceived UK-identity subversion should underly this relation.
Events violating group members’ (norm-based) expectations also influence how individuals view their own relation to a certain group. More specifically, events violating norm-based expectations can lead to disidentification. For example, research suggests that group members disidentify when they are confronted with another member violating the group’s norms and see no other way of distancing themselves from this person or when their group is continuously discriminated (
When group members are disidentified, this has adverse consequences for their groups.
In the post-referendum situation in the UK, switching to an alternative (subordinate) in-group seems a viable option, and such alternative groups are readily available: the UK’s constituent countries England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. These groups represent a unique opportunity to investigate the idea that disidentified group members may show collective action on behalf of alternative groups. Importantly, we herein define actions as collective when they aim at changing the conditions of an entire group (following
In the present study, we focus on Scotland. It represents an ideal case to investigate collective action from a social identity perspective, as many citizens strongly identify with Scotland (e.g.,
Hypothesis 2: Evaluating the EU-referendum process as violating expectations should be positively associated with intentions to engage in collective action on behalf of Scottish people (i.e., intentions to support a campaign for Scottish independence), and UK-disidentification should underly this relation.
This study was conducted during four consecutive days in late July 2017. By this time, Article 50 of the Lisbon treaty (stating that an EU-country may decide to leave the union) had formally been triggered: UK-politicians had officially notified the EU of the UK’s intention to leave the union and roughly two years remained for negotiations. Guidelines for these negotiations had been agreed upon (
In this situation, we tested our hypotheses that perceiving the EU-referendum process as expectancy-violating would be associated with two identity-related dynamics in our Scottish sample. Based on schism research, we assumed that it would be positively related to perceptions of UK-identity subversion, which in turn were assumed to be positively related to considering emigration (i.e., considering individual mobility,
We invited all participants from the platform
After accessing the online survey, participants were briefed about its general topic (i.e., perceptions of and intended reactions to Brexit), the study’s duration (5-10 minutes), their rights as participants, and the anonymity of data collection. After participants had provided informed consent to participate, the measures of interest as well as some further measures were collected (for full questionnaire, see
If not indicated otherwise, all measures reported below were collected using seven-point Likert-scales ranging from 1 (
We define our key predictor – expectancy-violation – as participants’ perception that the EU-referendum process has violated the expectations they had of political processes in the UK. As expectancy-violations usually result from a certain behaviour that is not in line with the norms one thinks apply to the given situation, our items were focused on the EU-referendum process. Moreover, we used slightly ambiguous items to make sure that we could capture expectancy-violations regardless of the norm a respondent felt was violated. In total, six items developed for this study (e.g., “In general, I think that the EU-referendum was carried out differently from how I think it should have been carried out like.”) were used. However, one item (“In general, I think that the EU-referendum was carried out in a way that is typical of the UK”; reverse scored) was excluded from the scale due to a low corrected item-total-correlation (after recoding),
Six items (α = .90, e.g., “The decision to leave the EU has subverted the true nature of the United Kingdom.”) measured to what extent participants perceived the decision to leave the EU to subvert the identity of the UK, that is, to question or fundamentally change the essence and meaning of the UK identity (cf.,
Nine items (α = .90) adapted from
Four items measured to what extent participants considered emigrating from the UK, e.g., “I find the idea of a life abroad appealing”. One item (“I see my long-term future in the United Kingdom.”; reverse scored) was excluded from the scale due to a low corrected item-total-correlation after recoding,
Participants were asked to indicate how likely they would be to perform six different activities (α = .95) related to a potential future independence referendum (1 =
Originally, we planned to analyse the data with several multiple regressions, but the more parsimonious test of our predictions is obviously to test one path model using structural equation modelling. Therefore, we do not report our original power analysis, but followed the recommendations for path models by
Subsequently, we provide information on our main hypothesis tests. We hypothesized that perceptions of expectancy-violation would be related to UK-identity subversion and UK-disidentification, which in turn would be related to individual mobility considerations and collective action intentions, respectively (i.e., we expected two indirect effects). To test these hypotheses, we created a saturated path model in which perceptions of expectancy-violation served as the predictor, UK-identity subversion and UK-disidentification served as parallel mediators, and individual mobility as well as collective action intentions served as outcome variables. We allowed for correlations between the two mediators, the two outcomes, and for direct relations between our predictor and the two outcomes. We employed MPlus (version 8.1,
Finally, the results of comparative analyses of model fit are described. To this end, we specified different models analogous to our key hypothesized model and tested their fit to the data.
We conducted a power analysis using a Monte Carlo simulation with 500 replications, treating estimates obtained in the main analysis (but with
To gain more insight into the power that could be achieved with our sample, an additional simulation was run. It assumed that 4% of the variance in each of the dependent variables (UK-identity subversion, UK-disidentification, collective action intentions, individual mobility considerations) is explained by the model, that the hypothesized relations are small (β = 0.20), and that all remaining paths are 0. This simulation indicated that with
Descriptive statistics and information on variable intercorrelations are provided in
Key Variable | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1. Expectancy-violation by EU referendum | 4.23 | 1.55 | .73*** | .34*** | .18* | .43*** |
2. UK-Identity subversion | 4.89 | 1.58 | – | .32*** | .16* | .55*** |
3. UK-Disidentification | 3.38 | 1.24 | – | .56*** | .26*** | |
4. Collective action intentions | 3.24 | 2.04 | – | .14* | ||
5. Individual mobility considerations | 5.02 | 1.52 | – |
*
In line with Hypothesis 1, we found a significant relation between perceiving the EU-referendum as an expectancy violation and individual mobility considerations, β = 0.43,
Perceiving the EU-referendum as an expectancy-violation was also significantly related to collective action intentions, β = 0.18,
Taken together, these results support our hypotheses by showing that perceiving the EU-referendum as having violated expectations was indeed positively related to individual mobility considerations, mediated via UK-identity subversion (
To test whether our proposed model fits the data better than possible alternative models, we ran several analyses based on the same overall pattern (one predictor, two mediators, two outcomes), changing which variable was used as predictor and which as mediators. We did not specify a correlation between the mediators (thus constraining it to 0), to obtain one free parameter for model fit assessment.
No. | Predictor | Parallel Mediators | Outcomes | AIC | χ2(1); |
RMSEA |
CFI | SRMR | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Estimate | 90% CI | |||||||||
1 | Expectancy-violation by EU referendum |
UK-identity subversion UK-disidentification |
Individual mobility considerations Collective action intentions |
2720.00 | 2.67; .102 | 0.09 | 0.00; 0.23 | .187 | 1.00 | 0.023 |
2 | UK-identity subversion |
Expectancy-violation by EU referendum UK-disidentification |
Individual mobility considerations Collective action intentions |
2714.83 | 5.50; .019 | 0.15 | 0.05; 0.28 | .052 | 0.99 | 0.029 |
3 | UK-disidentification | UK-identity subversion Expectancy-violation by EU referendum |
Individual mobility considerations Collective action intentions |
2940.49 | 133.82; < .001 | 0.81 | 0.70; 0.93 | < .001 | 0.59 | 0.163 |
Model comparisons indicate that the proposed model (minus the correlation between the mediators; Model No. 1) fits the data well, as three out of the four fit indices indicate good model fit based on the criteria outlined by
Finally, as previous work frequently explored effects on and of disidentification by means of assessing reduced identification, we computed an additional analysis adding UK-identification as an additional mediator along with the mediators included in our main analysis. The result pattern remained unchanged and we found no evidence that UK-identification acts as an additional mediator in our model (for details, see
The outcome of the EU-referendum in 2016 has sparked numerous protests across a time span of three and a half years (e.g.,
The relation between perceiving the EU-referendum as an expectancy-violation and individual mobility considerations was mediated by perceptions of UK-identity subversion, that is, by the perception that the outcomes of the referendum have fundamentally changed what it means to be a UK-citizen. This finding replicates previous social psychological research on group schisms (for a summary, see
The relation between perceptions of expectancy-violation and collective action intentions was mediated by disidentification from the citizens of the UK. Our results suggest that experiencing a political event as violating expectations is related to collective action intentions (i.e., intentions to change a [sub-]group’s situation) because such events are associated with group members perceiving a negative relation to the (superordinate) group. The potential consequences of this perceived negative relation to a group have, to date, been largely neglected by research on social identity management strategies. In relation to this field of research, the current study can thus be seen as a first step to filling an important research gap, as it investigated group members’ choice of a specific social identity management strategy while taking into account disidentification (i.e., a negative relationship to a group). Furthermore, the present findings provide a first indication that also intra-group dynamics may render the identity a group provides its members with unsatisfactory, which motivates group members to show identity management attempts. Future research on social identity management strategies, hence, may seek to systematically investigate how intra-group dynamics interact with socio-structural variables in influencing group members’ choice of a specific social identity management strategy.
Regarding research on disidentification, a noteworthy strength of our study is that we employed actual measures of disidentification instead of basing our conclusions on low levels of identification. We found that events within a group that are perceived as violating expectations are positively related to disidentification, thereby conceptually replicating previous findings (
When looking at our measures, however, two potential issues come to mind. First, it may be deemed problematic that our measure of expectancy-violation focused on
Second, it might be speculated that participants who had been critical of the UK already before the referendum, for example Scottish nationalists, may have responded differently to our measure of UK-identity subversion. However, our data do not provide sufficient evidence to support this idea (see
If future research is conducted to further investigate the identity-dynamics discussed, it may seek to address an important limitation of the current work: its correlational, cross-sectional nature. Our results are based on a single survey administered at one point in time and rely on participants’ self-reports. Hence, when we speak about predictors, mediators, and outcomes, these terms are purely based on theoretical reasoning. We would argue that the model comparisons showing a superior fit of the proposed model compared to various alternative models speak in favour of its validity and against assumptions of reverse causation. However, we can certainly not rule out the influence of potential unassessed third variables. Thus, to further explore the processes identified herein, future research may seek to longitudinally follow the development of a group, as experimentally inducing the investigated dynamics seems problematic - not least from an ethical point of view. Additionally, future research might also try to obtain more objective measures of individual mobility considerations (e.g., by longitudinally recording actual emigration) and collective action intentions (e.g., by investigating voting behaviour), to address the limitation of self-reports. What needs to be considered, however, is that the results of such an endeavour (or even of a replication of the present study) likely depend strongly on the time of data collection. Data collected during a more heated period of the Brexit negotiations or closer in time to the formal Brexit might yield stronger relations between the concepts. In both cases, we would expect identity concerns to be even more salient and considerations of what to do to be even more relevant than they were when the present study was conducted. Even though (the strength of) the relations investigated herein, thus, might vary depending on the time point of data collection, we nonetheless think that the present study offers important insights into the psychological aspects of geopolitical events for identity researchers and policy makers alike.
The present findings show that how a political event (or the process leading up to it) is perceived is closely tied to how people intend to react: The more respondents in the present study had the impression that their expectations had been violated by the EU-referendum, the more inclined they were to consider both emigration and collective action. This finding may be particularly relevant to policy makers, as both of these reactions can potentially harm a society: While considerations of and actual emigration could have adverse economic effects especially if young, well-educated citizens emigrate, collective action (on behalf of a sub-group within a larger group) may contribute to social division and unrest. This has two implications. First, policy makers from a subordinate group may strive to strategically construe the decisions and behaviours of policy makers from the superordinate group as violating expectations to rally members of the subordinate group to their cause. Second, and conversely, policy makers from the superordinate group may strive to prevent their behaviours and decisions from being viewed as violating expectations. This might be accomplished by rhetorically construing controversial decisions as consistent with a group’s norms and identity: Policy makers may seek to actively (re-)define what is normative for their group and thereby “manage” the group’s identity (e.g.,
The current study additionally shows that concerns about group memberships and social identities are not only relevant for the political decisions people make (e.g.,
To conclude, the current study suggests that two factors need to be considered when trying to understand the identity-related dynamics that, for Scots, were associated with the post-referendum situation in the UK: identity subversion and disidentification from the citizens of the UK. These dynamics were associated with different behavioural tendencies. A stronger impression that the EU-referendum’s outcomes had fundamentally changed what it means to be British was associated with a stronger consideration of emigrating from the UK, while feeling bad about being a citizen of the UK was related to stronger intentions to support a campaign for Scottish independence. These findings demonstrate the pervasive role identity processes will play in shaping the future of the post-referendum UK, thereby complementing earlier findings (e.g.,
Data and code for this publication are available in the open access repository PsychArchives (
The following Supplementary Materials for this publication are available via the PsychArchives repository (for access see
Research data and codebook
Code
Additional analyses and questionnaire
The authors have no funding to report.
The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
The research presented in this manuscript was carried out during the second author’s internship at the Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien.
The authors wish to thank Margarete Ocker for proof-reading an earlier version of this manuscript and Nora Umbach for her statistical advice.