The Professor Will See You Now: Tribal politics
Illustration by Tracy Worrall
4 min read
Lessons in political science. This week: tribal politics
Ten years, huh? Turns out time really does fly when you’re having fun. There is no more fun way to mark – celebrate? commiserate? (delete as applicable) – the 10th anniversary of the Brexit referendum than by reading Sara Hobolt and James Tilley’s excellent new book, Tribal Politics: How Brexit Divided Britain. It’s a model of social science, packed with data, yet clearly written, and enlivened by a string of digs at the wackier side of the last decade: terrible Brexit novels, conspiracy theories about pencils at polling stations, that Cambridge economist who turned up for a departmental meeting naked – with “Brexit Leaves Britain Naked” written across her breasts – and much more.
The book charts how the process of Brexit – both the referendum and the years of joy that followed – created two distinct political tribes in Britain. These tribes did not exist in any meaningful form prior to 2016, yet the referendum forced people to pick a side, even people who might previously have been relatively lukewarm one way or the other, and then what we might euphemistically call the lack of plain sailing thereafter helped reinforce those identities, creating ingroups (us: clever, honest, open-minded) and outgroups (them: selfish, hypocritical, closed-minded).
For most of the period since the referendum, more people saw themselves as remainers or leavers than supporters of all the political parties combined. And while the extent of this identity has dipped a little recently, its intensity has not. To quote the example the authors give: while most Lib Dem supporters say their identity is “not very important” to them (you can insert your own joke here), those who see themselves as remainers and leavers say that identity is “very important”. Even 10 years on, majorities of remainers and leavers still say “we” when talking about their side.
We often think that Americans are politically divided, but discrimination by one Brexit tribe against the other is as, or more, widespread than partisan discrimination by Democrats and Republicans. Almost all of this is pretty symmetrical, by the way. Although there are some differences – remainers being slightly worse than leavers – these are outweighed by the similarities. For the most part, your lot are just as bad as their lot.
From a 200-plus-page data-heavy book, containing 30 tables and over 40 graphs, it’s difficult to pull out individual highlights, but if I have a favourite graph – and I am the sort of person to have a favourite graph – then it is Figure 7.5, which tracks people’s attitudes on the state of the economy. The beauty with this one is that it reports the attitudes held by the same people both before and after the referendum. From it, we know that back in 2014, 2015 and 2016 those individuals who went on to become leavers and remainers felt almost identically about how well the economy was doing. Yet as soon as the referendum result was announced, a gap opened up, largely as a result of remainers suddenly thinking everything was going to pot, and that gap has persisted since. The same thing is even true when people were talking about their own finances; after the referendum, remainers suddenly felt personally poorer, while leavers felt richer, even though at that point nothing very much had changed either way. Partisanship is, as the saying goes, a hell of a drug.
A new paper in Political Behavior finds a similar pattern in the US with Tesla. Pre-2024, there was relatively little difference between the way Democrats and Republicans saw the car. Yet after Elon Musk threw in his lot with Donald Trump in 2024, and then led Doge, views began to diverge across different criteria: likelihood to buy, perceptions of quality, reputation, whether there was a buzz about it, and so on. The cars didn’t change, but how Americans saw them did, in ways that were overwhelmingly driven by their party loyalties.
Further reading: S Hobolt and J Tilley, Tribal Politics: How Brexit Divided Britain (2026); K Endres et al, Tesla Takedown: Brand Politicization and Partisan Consumerism in the Trump Era, Political Behavior (2026)
