Ethnic Minority Voters in 2019: Brexitland, or Business as Usual, 2020

The motivation for the study was that there has not been an in-depth investigation into the views of ethnic minority voters in Britain since the 2010 Ethnic Minority British Election Study, despite the fact that almost one in ten voters in Britain comes from an ethnic minority background. This means that existing accounts of political change, including of the EU referendum, and subsequent national political changes, pay insufficient attention to the political choices of ethnic minorities, and both academic and political understanding of the effects of Brexit on subsequent vote choice is so far patchy and incomplete. Moreover, existing survey questions that are used to study political attitudes may be insufficient to capture the views of ethnic minority respondents. For example, survey questions that ask generally about immigration may be more difficult to give a overall answer to for respondents who have family experience of migration, compared to question which ask about different types of immigration. We designed the interviews to provide information that will be generative in designing future survey question on the political and social views of ethnic minorities. Thus the aims of the study were firstly to provide new evidence about the range of views that ethnic minority voters hold about political events since 2016, and also to guide the development of future fieldwork in this area. This was achieved through semi-structured interviews that were conducted over the phone from April to July 2020. The topic guide contained questions on: whether the respondent voted in the 2019 UK general election, and if so who for; the main reasons for their vote; key campaign issues; race and discrimination in politics; views on parties and leaders; the 2016 referendum; and whether Brexit was an important part of respondent’s identity. Respondents were given an incentive payment of £40 in vouchers.