One in five who voted for Brexit now think it was the wrong decision | Hacker News Reader

One in five who voted for Brexit now think it was the wrong decision

yougov.co.uk

Yeah. great. It's too late though, isn't it? The damage is done.

'Thanks'. 'Well done'.

If you added the word "Only" to the title, it would completely change the subtext.

Agreed. Is this figure supposed to be high? Seems like there's a good chance that 1 in 5 Biden voters now think it was the wrong decision and 1 in 5 Trump thought similarly after his years in office.

Way more than 1 in 5 Biden voters, given the last two years...

Guess they decided they look better in brown.

Any mistake is only for 4 years.

It's high given that the original referendum was so close. It was a rather large and irrevocable decision based on a bare majority.

People may regret their choices in elections, but they can revisit them every few years. Brexit is, if not forever, at least for a very long time.

Two mutually contradictory caveats:

1. The referendum itself was never intended to be serious. It was held because David Cameron thought it would fail, in order to shut up the anti-Europe wing of his party. He resigned over it.

2. Although the referendum was close, it was effectively affirmed by the elections in the wake of Cameron's resignation. It was still close, but they ended up with a majority for the party campaigning explicitly on a pro-Brexit platform.

This adds up to a cautionary tale on referendums. A big question was put to the people -- even bigger than an election -- and a largish majority (not a bare majority) are unhappy about the result.

In that sense, yes, 20% is a pretty big number. Not that it changes anything. It's much too late for that, and it doesn't tell us anything about the counterfactual where the referendum lost. But it's worth remembering going forward, both with respect to the EU and for national decision-making.

The original title sticks to the actual claim, and doesn't add subtext. You can interpret "one in five" in either direction. You can say 80% of Brexit voters are still fine with their vote, or you can say the 20% who have changed their minds would be enough to reverse the decision could the vote be held again now.

So yeah, adding words does add subtext, but your phrasing of this seems to imply that there is existing subtext. What do you see, specifically?

Choice of words is a component of subtext, as you hinted at yourself. Below I have hilighted the key action word, which is also an important choice when setting subtext.

"One in 5 people now think" is a positive-sounding construction which lends more statstical weight to the result than an impartial examination of the numbers, and people who scan headlines are far from impartial.

Other constructions are "4 in 5 still support...", or "80% still support", or "20% now think", which are all still mathematically neutral, but the subtext is different.

Is there a phrasing you think would be neutral that still references that data point?

I'm struggling to figure out a neutral phrasing involving this data point. My reading of your response indicates that you see a temporal indicator ("now") or a delta indicator ("still" / "no longer") as both introducing bias. "One in five people think Brexit was the wrong decision" without anything clarifying significantly misrepresents the data.

It seems your issue is actually with the data point being in the headline at all. Maybe the headline should be a dry thing like "A Brexit survey happened, read inside for details". I won't entirely disagree. But I think this is less about word choice than you think.

I think it was the book "How to lie with statistics" that dedicated a page or two to the perceived differences when "x%" is used vs "1 in x", depending on the actual value.

I think that using "20% now think that..." would give a more accurate impression to someone scanning the headline.

Isn't that a well known fact that you can generally change the meaning and/or subtext of everything by adding or subtracting a word?

I am not sure if the state of the UK economy would be substantially different without Brexit. Most of the problems would be the same, maybe with a slightly bigger carpet under which to hide the dirt.

From what I can tell probably more than that number had no idea what they were voting for when they voted leave. Those who voted remain did know what they were voting for. Hence the difference. Too late now.

And there are also people on the other side who changed their mind. Less, but apparently it was also 1 in 5 in the early days of COVID. So don't overinterpret these numbers: it still looks very divided.

Is that a lot? What's the usual rate of regret six years after a vote?

Alternative headline: Four times as many leave voters as remain voters would vote differently in hindsight, but most haven't changed their opinion.

yougov also repeatedly reports that x% of the UK population want COVID-19 restrictions to continue indefinitely, along with the closure of nightclubs. You'll forgive me if I don't treat yougov as the main source of UK sentiment

It's a sample of N~1700, so +/- 2% for a 95% confidence interval. The responses are weighted so self-selection along socio-demographic variables is mostly accounted for.

Sure, almost all off-the-shelf polling is rather bad these days, but they did their job as well as you can reasonably expect.

Polling has un-earned respect lately in the US. Is there any reason to suspect opinion polls are more reliable in the UK? Afaik people are just as shifted away from landlines there.

Modern polling is hard because people tend to distrust elites more than in the past. It's a fundamentally unsolvable problem to elicit attitudes from people who lie to you, lie to themselves and make up opinions on the spot.

That said, modern polling uses a host of techniques and is of course not tied to landlines. Companies use access panels of available participants, f2f sampling (walking to random people's houses, but that's expensive of course), and in particular statistics such as poststratification.

Which means that 80% support this decision 6 years later.

That's misleading.

51.89% voted for Brexit. That leaves 41.51% now.

48.11% voted against Brexit. If that hasn't changed, the British public no longer support the policy.

But doesn't everyone usually say how dumb the general public is, citing the results when posed a ridiculous question?

Can't help but feel people are citing democracy here when it aligns with them but otherwise they're scornful of the general public.

British politicians abdicated their responsibilities to said public. The non-binding referendum with no implementation details passed by a tiny majority became "the people's will".

I think something of Brexit's magnitude should've required more than a simple majority of the population to proceed with.

Actually only about 70% of leave voters, with the other 11% undecided.

I think the interesting data point is that 19% of leave voters would vote differently in hindsight, but only 5% of remain voters would. That's a 4x difference. But you're also right that most people did not change their opinion.

This is exactly the statistic I was wondering about. One of the things that struck me about the original vote was that it was pretty close (~52%-48%). And the funny thing about close votes is how much power the 51st voter gets for their decision in spite of clear signalling that people don't actually know the answer.

Like, the original thing you're asking is probably not very well understood or not very consequential if about half the population is for and against it.

You can absolutely make a decision based on this, but you're asking a whole bunch of "armchair experts" their opinions, only to find out that they don't know because they don't have a good concept of the suggestion.

So the change in opinions after the fact is actually probably a lot more meaningful than the original vote was.

YouGov. Whatever.

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