Love thy Neighbor? Brexit and Hate Crime

This paper examines the effect of the Brexit referendum vote on racially- and religiously-biased hate crimes, based on a unique dataset compiled using Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, containing hate crime statistics in the period between January 2011 and February 2017, as well as publicly available Community Safety Partnership (CSP) hate crime data. To this end, we employ difference-in-differences (DiD) and synthetic control methods, using other crime categories as a control group. Different model specifications control for economic and demographic characteristics of the area and, at a later stage, will examine the role of social media as a potential transfer mechanism. Potential changes in the probability of reporting a crime and changes in police behaviour following the referendum are also taken into account. In addition to measuring the overall effect of the Brexit vote on hate crime, we also examine the persistence of the effect, and compare its magnitude between the Remain and Leave areas. The main conclusions suggest that there is a short-run increase in hate crimes immediately following the referendum vote, and that an increase in hate crime is found in both Remain and Leave areas. The paper contributes to a small body of literature in economics examining the impact of political shocks on hate crime incidences.

JEL Classification: D72, K42, L82

Keywords: Brexit, Hate crime, Social media