The referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU was a watershed moment for research communication. Despite a near total academic consensus on the negative economic consequences of a vote to Leave, this message did not decisively influence public opinion. A decade on, Romesh Vaitilingam reflects on whether we have truly learned how Brexit reshaped public engagement with research.

Ten years after the referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union, one question continues to nag at many economists. If there was such a broad professional consensus that Brexit would be bad news for the UK economy, why did our warnings fail to cut through sufficiently with the general public?

Was it a failure of effective communication of expert analysis and research evidence? Or were economists simply out of their depth in the face of a political and media campaign for Leave that had no hesitation in bending the truth, undermining the idea of expertise and accusing the Remain side of a strategy based on negativity and scaremongering?

This is not an exercise in relitigating the referendum itself. Nor is it to claim that economic analysis alone should have determined the outcome. Brexit was always about much more than economics. Questions of sovereignty, immigration, democracy and national identity mattered enormously – and for many voters, they mattered more than forecasts about GDP, trade or investment.

An expert consensus

But there remains a puzzle. Before the vote, the UK’s economists did something they rarely do: they reached virtual unanimity. Researchers associated with the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP), the Centre for Macroeconomics (CFM), the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) and UK in a Changing Europe, among others, produced analyses pointing in broadly the same direction: a vote for Brexit would have damaging economic consequences.

The Treasury and the Bank of England reached similar conclusions. Leading academic economists signed public letters. The late Nicholas Crafts, Swati Dhingra, Jonathan Portes, Thomas Sampson, John Van Reenen, Simon Wren-Lewis, Tony Yates and many more professional economists devoted countless hours to explaining what the evidence suggested.

Yet much of that evidence seemed to bounce off public debate.

A failure of communication

At the time, many economists – including me – tended to see this as a failure of communication. We needed to explain our research more clearly, avoid jargon, use better examples and engage more effectively with journalists and the public.

I still think all that is true. But with the benefit of hindsight, it also seems incomplete.

The real lesson of 2016 is not simply that economists communicated badly. It is that we were communicating as though the old rules of public debate still applied.

For generations, researchers had worked on a relatively straightforward assumption. Produce rigorous evidence, publish it through credible institutions and communicate it honestly – and it will at least command serious attention. People may disagree with your conclusions, but they will engage with the substance of the argument.

That was no longer the world we were living in.

The personalisation of expertise

One of the most striking features of the referendum campaign was how often economic arguments were met not with counter-evidence but with attacks on the people presenting them. Economists were portrayed as members of a self-interested metropolitan elite. Academics were accused of protecting EU-funded research grants. The then governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, was alleged to be part of an establishment conspiracy.

Michael Gove’s much-quoted observation that ‘people in this country have had enough of experts’ captured something real – not a rejection of knowledge itself, but a deep scepticism about the institutions and people claiming authority.

From the perspective of political campaigning, this was highly effective. If you can persuade voters that the messenger is biased, the message hardly needs answering.

Economists, perhaps understandably, were ill-equipped for this kind of argument. Our instinct was to respond with more evidence, more charts and more analysis. But evidence only persuades if people first trust the institutions that are producing it.

Economic hubris, political nemesis

There was another mismatch too. Economists believed they were answering the central question facing the country: would Brexit make the country more or less prosperous?

Many voters were asking a different question altogether. Who should make UK laws? How should immigration be controlled? What kind of country do we want to be?

These are not questions that economics can settle, nor should it pretend to. Looking back, one of our mistakes was to assume that because the economic consequences were important, they would also be decisive.

The Leave campaign, by contrast, understood that politics is rarely just an exercise in cost-benefit analysis. It offered a simple, emotionally compelling story about ‘taking back control’. Economists responded with discussions of productivity, trade barriers and foreign direct investment.

Both messages were sincere. Only one spoke directly to the values and identities that motivate many political decisions.

The challenge of communicating uncertainty

There was also a problem of language.

Good economists are trained to express uncertainty. We talk about probabilities, scenarios and confidence intervals. We distinguish between short-run adjustment and long-run effects. We qualify our conclusions because intellectual honesty demands it.

Political campaigns reward almost exactly the opposite qualities.

‘Brexit is likely to reduce productivity growth over the medium term’ is an accurate statement. ‘Project Fear’ is a better slogan.

Indeed, one irony of the referendum is that many of the profession’s longer-term predictions have proved broadly correct. Trade with the EU has been lower than it would otherwise have been. Business investment has been weaker. Productivity has suffered. Few serious economists would now dispute that Brexit has imposed significant economic costs.

But being right eventually is not the same as being persuasive at the moment in which decisions are made.

The media environment made matters harder still. Broadcasters faced the difficult task of reporting an overwhelming expert consensus while maintaining political impartiality. Too often, impartiality came to mean balancing carefully researched evidence against political assertion, giving audiences the impression that economists were deeply divided when they were not.

At the same time, political communication itself was changing. Targeted social media campaigns, personalised messaging and online networks proved extraordinarily effective at reinforcing existing beliefs. Economists were still writing reports, newspaper articles, letters and blogposts. The campaign had already moved elsewhere.

Learning the lessons of Brexit?

So where does this mean for those of us who care about communicating economic research?

The first lesson is a humbling one. Better communication matters, but it has limits. No amount of clearer explanation would, by itself, have resolved deep disagreements about sovereignty or identity.

The second is that researchers need to think much harder about trust. People rarely evaluate evidence in isolation. They ask who is speaking, whose interests they represent and whether they share their values. Rebuilding that trust is likely to be a much bigger challenge than simplifying economic language.

Third, economists need to become better storytellers – not by sacrificing rigour, but by connecting evidence to people’s lived experience. GDP matters because jobs matter. Productivity matters because wages matter. Trade matters because communities depend on it. Abstract statistics become meaningful only when they illuminate everyday life.

Finally, we need to recognise that public engagement is no longer an optional extra for academic research. It is part of the job. Other disciplines have invested heavily in communicating evidence to wider audiences. Economics should be no different.

Professional bodies such as the Royal Economic Society should be in the business of supporting economists in engaging with the media and wider public debate, perhaps by launching something akin to the Science Media Centre. As Paul Johnson, then director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), wrote shortly after the referendum: ‘Collectively we economists need to find some way of getting our messages across that goes beyond reliance on individual institutions.’

There is one final irony. The referendum is often presented as evidence that expertise no longer matters. I draw the opposite conclusion.

Expertise matters enormously. That is precisely why it became a target.

The lesson of Brexit is not that economists should become political campaigners or abandon their commitment to objectivity. It is that producing good evidence is only half the task. In an age when authority itself is contested, economists need to devote as much care to how evidence is communicated – and why it should be trusted – as they do to producing it in the first place.

Originally published on LSE Blogs and shared with permission from the author.