Had enough of Brexit? Tough. Here’s some more.

Not really. I’ll leave you to find an argument to have if you want but this is really just an observation or two about the demographics of those signing the Revoke Article 50 petition and not the issues behind it. The large numbers involved make it an interesting example for UK government petitions and maybe online activism more broadly.

For the blissfully unaware of Brexit details, I’m referring to this petition to revoke Article 50 (in other words, stop the process of the UK leaving the EU), which is currently at 5̶.̶5̶ 5̶.̶7̶5̶ 5.85 million electronic signatures. It is a UK government hosted petition and this is the largest number of signatures of any petition that has been on the platform. With the tension around the Brexit issue there is a lot of heated analysis and claims about what the numbers mean that range from it being overrun by bot accounts to it being a clear demonstration of how a referendum rerun would go to Remain. This will hopefully be a little more measured.

Into the Data

The obvious starting point is that Remain voters would be signing this petition and that the number of Remainers in a constituency should correlate to the petition numbers. While the referendum wasn’t counted by parliamentary constituency (and the petition is), the house of commons data library offers a dataset that combines known constituency counts with estimates from a model that we can use. Joining that with the petition report gives this: