Prosperity, Austerity, and Immigration: Regional Drivers of Populism's Growth in the UK, 2010–2024

Over the last 15 years, support for UK populist parties — UKIP and later Reform UK —has risen significantly. While voter surveys often point to immigration as the primary driver, this study employs a quantitative regional analysis to assess the relative importance of prosperity, austerity, and immigration in explaining populist voting. It uses constituency-level election results aggregated to the ten ITL1 regions of England and Wales to model changes in the populist vote share between the 2010 and 2024 general elections. Three objective proxies are employed: regional house prices (for prosperity), discretionary public spending per capita (for austerity), and the share of the foreign-born population (for immigration). Bivariate and multivariate OLS regression analyses show that only house price changes have a robust, statistically significant effect, with rising prosperity being linked to lower populist vote shares (negative correlation). The rationale for using house prices is based on their macroeconomic significance and centrality to household wealth. However, correlation does not imply causation, and the mechanisms linking prosperity and voting behaviour are likely to be more complex, involving perceptions, political messaging, and cultural factors. The contribution of this study is to extend prior work on Brexit voting by providing a multivariate, longitudinal comparison of prosperity, austerity, and immigration across multiple UK elections. Its main limitation is the reliance on just ten regional data points. Future research should use more granular local authority-level data, incorporate survey-based perceptions of immigration (not only real immigration data), and explore causal relationships using more advanced statistical methods. This paper has been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication in the National High School Journal of Science (2025). This is the author-accepted version; the formatted publisher version will appear at [https://nhsjs.com/2025/prosperity-austerity-and-immigration-an-empirical-study-of-the-regional-drivers-of-populisms-growth-in-the-uk-2010-2024/].