Tumultuous pies: Electoral dynamics in the Brexit era

How does the emergence of a major new cross-cutting issue dimension reshape electoral dynamics in a stable multi-party democracy? We take advantage of recent developments in the modeling of compositional outcome variables to test rival theoretical propositions about this using data from the 2015, 2017, and 2019 parliamentary elections in England. We find that many of the long-present dynamics, such as economic voting, that were evident in 2015, were either absent or greatly reduced in 2017 and 2019. As such, we conclude that the Brexit debate did indeed crowd out “normal” political debate in 2017 and 2019.