EU Brexit Referendum – A Look Behind The Numbers

The EU Referendum has been a huge talking point, right around the world. Whatever happens next, the effects of this vote will be felt for generations to come.

Taking the politics out for a moment, and returning to something a little more ‘my area’, I thought I’d take look at what proportion of registered voters actually voted one way or another.

Interestingly, 37% of the eligible UK population voted to leave.

I then did the same exercise for previous major referendums. What I thought I might find was that there were examples where a vote was secured with an overall majority of the electorate. That wasn’t the case, nor (with a cursory look) did I find any such examples in Switzerland, the home of referendums. The closest we had was the Scottish Independence Referendum, where 47% of the eligible population voted to stay in the UK

What I did find interesting, however, was that whilst the sample group is quite small, there does appear to be a trend between the size of the turnout, and the closeness of the result. Not necessarily surprising, but it’s always nice to see things ‘in full colour’.

So there you go, the 2016 EU Referendum in the context of previous referendums. There hasn’t been a national referendum won by an overall majority of the registered electorate.

Whether or not 37% of the population is enough to trigger such a significant change, is of course a very different subject!