(This is the latest in the occasional series of reviews of books about Brexit. They can all be accessed via the tag ‘book reviews’. My normal fortnightly post will appear next Friday.)
Hobolt, Sara & Tilley, James (2026) Tribal Politics. How Brexit Divided Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780198911715 (Hardback). 243 pp. £30
This excellent new book is a major addition to the academic literature on Brexit, as well as being accessible and fascinating for non-academic readers interested in Brexit or contemporary British politics generally. Indeed, one implication of the book is that it isn’t really possible to understand contemporary British politics without understanding Brexit because of the endurance of the identities of ‘leaver’ and ‘remainer’.
It is these identities which are the subject of the book. That is to say, this is not a book about the referendum, the parliamentary politics which followed, the negotiations with the EU, or the impact of Brexit on economics or international relations. Whilst all of these are touched upon, the specific focus is describing and explaining Brexit identities amongst the public/ voters and how and why, as the title suggest, these have proved sufficiently divisive to take on a ‘tribal’ character.
The idea that such Brexit identities exist is not, of course, a new one. Apart from being familiar from everyday experience, it has previously been recognized by academics (e.g. Sobolewska & Ford, 2020) and the authors of this book, two eminent political scientists based at LSE and Oxford respectively, rigorously reference and discuss the extant literature. However, Hobolt & Tilley provide the first comprehensive study of how and why, despite EU membership having been an issue of low salience for most voters prior to the referendum, these identities came to exist and have persisted for so long after Britain actually left the EU and after Brexit ceased to feature prominently in the news.
Summary of book
The basic fact of that persistence is most clearly summarized in a chart (p. 88) showing the percentage of people thinking of themselves as remainers or leavers over the period 2017-2026. In essence, the chart shows that those identifying as one or the other, whilst falling from 75% in 2017, was still 60% in 2025. At the outset of the period, each group had about the same level of identification, at about 37%. That figure persists for remainer identification but, after 2020, the figure for leaver identification falls to about 23% by 2025. The authors explain the various reasons for this disparity, some of which are more obvious than others, but, overall, they argue that its significance should not be exaggerated and that “the difference in the trajectory of the two groups is … much less interesting than the similarity between them” (p. 96).
The explanation of why an issue (in this case Brexit) can give rise to issue-based identities is given in terms of the existence of three conditions (pp. 3-4, and more extensively pp. 19-22). These are “issue contestation” (there is strong conflict between groups around a salient, meaning essentially non-trivial, issue); “issue expression” (expressing, in word or deed, commitment to that issue cements identification with the group); and “issue alignment” (the issue doesn’t align with existing identifications, such as political parties, so can become the basis for an identity in its own right). Brexit, the authors suggest, “provided the Goldilocks mixture” (p. 1) of these conditions.
This explanatory framework derives from Social Identification Theory, which is elaborated in chapter two of the book (pp. 10-27) as an alternative (or perhaps a supplement) to rational choice theories of political behavior (p. 11), and the next three chapters explain how and why the issue of Brexit was able to become the basis for such social identification. An important argument within that is Hobolt & Tilley’s demonstration that Brexit identities can’t be reduced to pre-existing characteristics such as educational level but “were ultimately the product of the vote and the political context of the vote” (p.74). So, contrary to what is often believed, Brexit marked a distinctive rupture and not simply a reprise or rebadging of established patterns of political sociology.
Equally important are the chapters thereafter, which explain how these identities have persisted and, in some respects, intensified over time through processes of “affective polarization” (pp. 96-119). Some of this is explained in terms of personality traits (pp. 153-159), but perhaps more interestingly by the ways in which Brexit identities, once in place, tended to create “a set of incentives to adjust one’s views accordingly” (p. 145). That is, to avoid “cognitive dissonance” (pp. 121-124) people tend to take on all of the views of their ‘tribe’ and to interpret developments through that lens. In this and other ways “confirmation bias” (p. 122, and pp. 120-146 generally) has tended to solidify leaver and remainer identities
Such solidification evidently connects with the familiar idea that social media has led us to exist within ‘echo chambers’, re-enforcing our pre-existing views and even making them more extreme. However, the authors provide strong evidence to support their claim that “the real echo chamber” (p. 169) is not social media nearly so much as it is real life family and friendship networks. At all events, leaver and remainer identities have proved sufficiently durable to at least contribute to realignments in voting patterns, which are the subject of the final chapter (pp. 176-188).
There is obviously much more in the book than I have summarized here, and indeed it would be impossible to do justice to the formidable amount of data, analysis and scholarship within it. To my delight, given my great interest in the novels of C.P. Snow as a source of political insights, it even includes reference to one of his novels (p. 153).
Limitations and criticisms
The book does, however, have some limitations (as all books do). One is that the data presented are almost entirely quantitative (mainly large-scale longitudinal surveys). That has many strengths in terms of charting attitudes over time, and can capture things like emotional attachment to identities (see pp. 101-105), but does not provide the kind of insights into the meaning of Brexit identities for those who hold them which could be disclosed by including qualitative data. To put that another way, despite the focus on ‘tribes’ there is little anthropological sensibility in the analysis.
Another limitation is that the deployment of Social Identification Theory, and especially the work of Henri Tajfel, is not accompanied by any real discussion of the criticisms made of it (e.g. Dashtipour, 2012: Schnur, 2024). Personally, I don’t mind that too much, perhaps reflecting the fact that I am now an ex-academic, but having worked in a field where identity theories (in the plural) are of central importance (e.g. Kenny et al., 2011) I can imagine some of my former colleagues bridling a little.
What I would be slightly more critical of is where this theoretical framing leads. The things which are presented as conditions for the formation of Brexit identities are arguably rather circular. That is most obviously so as regards the condition of ‘issue contestation’, since the existence of strong conflict between groups about a salient issue presupposes that which it seeks to explain: if there are already groups in strong conflict about an issue, those groups will already have members, and membership implies at the very least proto-identification (and almost certainly some degree of ‘issue expression’).
Relatedly, what makes an issue ‘salient’, in the sense it is used here, is that something important is at stake apart from, and at least to some extent prior to, the identities which coalesce around it, but this is somewhat occluded by the theoretical framing of this book. The original work of Tajfel was, as the authors explain (pp. 11-12), based on experiments in which participants were found to embrace tribe-like identities even when the issues dividing them were arbitrarily assigned and had no objective and non-trivial basis. On such an account it is the psychological need for identification, not the issue, which is primary.
Whilst Hobolt & Tilley recognize that the “lab-based experimental paradigm” (p. 19) is neglectful of the social and political context of issue-based identities, the trace of this psychologistic, ‘Tajfelian’ account persists. The result is that remainer and leaver identities are treated as equivalent, differing in political content but not in psychological process. That makes the analysis non-partisan, which is in many ways admirable both for its academic detachment and because it is no doubt true that the psychological processes constituting remainer and leaver identities (affective polarization, avoidance of cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias etc.) are very similar.
However, political actors – voters – people – don’t develop identities irrespective of the substance of what makes issues contestable. Thus, contestation over salient issues is both a condition and a consequence of political identities, and political identities are both a condition and a consequence of contestation over salient issues. This isn’t to deny the authors’ point (e.g. p.135) that policy opinions can be, and often are, substantially shaped by political identities, but nor does that point negate mine: it’s not ‘either/or’ but ‘both/and’.
Moreover, connecting to my earlier comment about the absence of qualitative data about meaning, whilst it is highly plausible that the processes through which remainer and leaver identities develop are very similar, it doesn’t follow, and probably isn’t the case, that what it means to remainers to be remainers is the same as what it means to leavers to be leavers. And it is also quite likely that, in both cases, this meaning has changed over time even though the identity-labels have persisted. This in turn may well mean that what the ‘issue’ is understood to be, and the reasons for its ‘salience’, have changed over time, which is another way of saying that there is a recursive interaction between ‘issue’ and ‘identity’.
There’s certainly much about Brexit which can be analyzed in political-psychological terms, and I sometimes do so myself on this blog and elsewhere. But there's a limit to the traction of viewing it in terms of tribal identities, as if it were akin to the dispute between Big-Endians and Little-Endians in Swift’s (1726) political satire Gulliver’s Travels, unless political conflicts are to be detached from political rationality and subsumed within psychological rationales. If, as this book amply demonstrates, Brexit identities have become strongly embedded then it is at least in part for reasons which lie beyond identity, in the same way as is true for other political identities (such as those based on political parties). In what is a broadly ‘rationalistic’ (albeit not a ‘rational choice’) analysis it is perhaps slightly surprising that the focus is so resolutely on the arguers and so relatively little on what they are arguing about.
Conclusion
These criticisms (or, perhaps, they are just variants of a single criticism) do not affect my opening assessment that, overall, this is an excellent book providing compelling analysis of an important topic. It is packed with highly informative data and acute interpretation, and is written with admirable lucidity, especially given the complexity of some of the material. It is, indeed, strange to think that, only ten years ago, the identities of leaver and remainer simply didn’t exist and yet are now a familiar part of political life and the political lexicon. As with all the best social science, this book interrogates the familiar whilst making the strange explicable.
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