Author Archive

Vladimir Bortun (DSPI, University of Oxford)

Vladimir Bortun is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Department of Social Policy and Intervention at the University of Oxford. He works on the Changing Elites project, where he is focusing on the nexus between class, power and decision-making among British elites. His other research interests include transnational politics and radical left parties.

For years academic literature and broader public debates have largely framed the Brexit referendum as a ‘popular revolt against the elites’. While some emphasised the role of economic factors and others boiled it down to anti-immigration attitudes, most accounts seem to converge around this bottom-up perspective that ordinary people disillusioned with the elites have driven the UK out of the EU. Conversely, apart from a few dissenting voices, the idea that economic elites have been mostly opposed to Brexit has been the prevailing view in the literature. Challenging the over-emphasis on the voting process, Marlène Benquet (University of Paris Dauphine) and Théo Bourgeron (University of Edinburgh) invite us to look more closely at the role played by the economic interests …