On Friday, the documentary filmmaker Dieter Deswarte challenged us to go around London and conduct Vox pop interviews to discover Londoners’ perceptions about some of the most pressing European issues. A Vox pop, abbreviated from the Latin phrase ‘vox populi’ which means ‘the voice of the people’, is a collection of opinions on a particular subject.
As Brexit is currently one of the most debated and contested issues in the UK and in the EU, we decided to focus our Vox pop interviews on this issue. More precisely, we agreed to investigate a crucial aspect of the ‘Leave’ campaign – the percentage of EU migrants in the UK.
We wanted to find out what people on the street estimated the percentage of the UK population was actually made up of EU citizens. Their estimations ranged from 2% to over 30%. Interestingly, many of them largely overestimated the percentage of EU migrants in the UK. The most common value we encountered was 15 %.
In reality, around 3.7 million people who live in the UK are citizens of another EU country. This amounts to about 5 to 6% of the UK population. Of the non-British nationals in the UK, the majority are Polish nationals. The second-largest group are Romanian nationals.
So why did people tend to overestimate the percentage of EU citizens in the UK? Many interviewees traced their views back to the influence of the media, particularly during the Brexit debate.
As Alberto Nardelli and George Arnett explain in The Guardian, misconceptions can be very potent if they are employed by politicians who seek to shape voters’ perceptions. Because the departure from objective facts can provoke powerful emotional reactions, distorted views of reality are put forth by politicians seeking successful elections. Therefore, by provoking an emotional reaction, unfounded fears such as the one related to EU migrants in the UK are reinforced and augmented by politicians as well as the media.
If voters overestimate the saliency of an issue, that is if they are made to believe that an issue is more pressing than it actually is, they are more likely to vote for a party which focuses on fighting to solve this matter.
Perhaps an even more obvious example of politicians distorting facts and shaping public perception in order to gain a political advantage was the NHS pledge that was situated at the heart of the ‘Leave’ campaign and thus prominently displayed on the official ‘Vote Leave’ bus. The ‘Leave’ camp argued that the UK had been sending £350m a week to Brussels and that this money could be better spent on the NHS if the UK left the EU. However, this figure was grossly overestimated. In fact, Britain’s net weekly payment was closer to $250m. Furthermore, this promise was quickly abandoned after the Brexit vote.
All in all, we can conclude that perceptions – especially those that are based on faulty or no evidence – have significant impact on the public debate and political decisions. In our case, the perception that the EU migrants make up a much larger percentage of the UK population might have led many people to the voting polls on 23 June 2016 and caused them to vote ‘Leave’.
We hope that through our interviews we have spread at least a bit of awareness with regards to the dangers embedded in misperceptions and that we encouraged people to question statements that seem factual at first glance.
Please follow this link for our Vox pop interviews.
Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA
European London 