Polarising Press: The Effect of Media Consumption on Brexit Identity

In the wake of the 2016 EU referendum, many British voters came to identify with their side of the Brexit debate, thinking of themselves as Remainers or Leavers. These new social identities rivalled partisan identity in prevalence and strength, continue to do so seven years after the referendum, and have been linked experimentally to affective polarisation. Little is understood about the formation of these identities, nor the mechanisms that led some individuals to form stronger attachments than others to their side of the Brexit divide. In this paper, I focus on one potential cause of Brexit identification; media consumption. By fitting models with individual-level fixed effects to British Election Study panel data, I find no evidence that identification over time is a product of media consumption, but the strength of that identification is reinforced by a person's level of media consumption. I find that, for both Remain and Leave identifiers, spending more time watching television, reading newspapers and browsing the Internet is associated with a stronger sense of social identification with their side of the Brexit debate. The findings have important implications for our understanding of the role that media can play in transforming political divides into social divisions, an important topic given how many democracies are currently exhibiting increasing political polarisation.