The Knowledge behind Brexit. A Descriptive Bibliographic Analysis of Brexit Impact Studies in the United Kingdom and the European Union

The decision of the United Kingdom to exit (Brexit) the European Union was followed by accusations about a dishonest referendum campaign by the ‘leave’camp, based on alternative facts and fake news. This ‘post-truth’ politics is said to be continuing during the Brexit negotiations between the UK and the EU. One of the problems this time is measuring the impact of Brexit so as to inform the negotiating sides about their future policy options. The UK, a country with a big tradition in impact assessments, only drafted a series of less systematic Brexit ‘sectoral analyses’, the release of which was partly censored and marked by political turbulence. There was no issues arising from the EU side. Given the big impact assessment tradition in both the EU and the UK this difference between them with respect to the Brexit impact studies is puzzling. Has the UK regressed to post-truth, post-fact policy making? And how scientific is the knowledge behind the EU impact assessments? The paper throws light into those questions by analyzing the different sources of knowledge that were cited in the UK Government’s 39 Brexit Sectoral Reports (SRs) and the European Parliament’s 46 Impact Assessments. What are the knowledge sources used to inform the Brexit impact reports on both sides of the Channel? Is there a prevalent source of knowledge in each report and how can variability in the prevalence of different types of knowledge source be explained? In order to address these questions we gathered bibliometric data via citation analysis of 3537 unique references within the 85 published impact studies. We analyzed whether the sources of knowledge used in each report vary according to differences in the knowledge regimes between the UK and the EU; policy sectors; the location of the author (internal – external) to the sponsor of the report; and the affiliation of the author of the report. Our observations provide evidence against the post-truth claim, yet also question whether the knowledge base is variegated enough to be able to inform decisions on such a complex, salient and urgent issue as Brexit.