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With the UK voting to leave the EU and uncertainty is spreading, many are now looking back in astonishment trying to understand the success of the Brexit campaign. One interesting aspect that emerged from the Leave vs. Remain debate had been the strong disparity between expert advice making the case against Brexit, on the one hand, and the growing strength of the Leave vote, on the other hand. Indeed, we have had an abundance of doomsday economic predictions from major actors in global politics in case the UK leaves the EU. Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England, asserted that a ‘A vote to leave the European Union could have material economic effects’, and might spark a recession. The IMF chief, Christine Lagarde, argued that leaving the EU would result in dire economic times for both the UK and the EU. The outcome, she said, would be somewhere between ‘pretty bad to very, very bad’. To these one could add the warnings from President Obama, the G7, major corporations like Microsoft and HP, and the Institute for Fiscal Studies which predicted a two-year austerity ensuing a Brexit. Indeed, apart from the Economist for Britain and the founder of the pub chain Wetherspoon who supported Brexit, most predicted the British economy would not improve in the case of a Brexit.

The outcome seems clear now: the more economic advice we received against leaving the EU the stronger the Leave campaign became. How could we then account for the appeal of the Leave campaign, their ability to galvanize public opinion despite such strong and nearly unanimous economic analyses arguing against Brexit? Equally important …