The Politics of Belonging Come Home: Neighborhood Belonging in the Context of Brexit

• In Event: The Increasing Significance of Local Context in Immigrant Integration

Abstract

When the politics of belonging intensifies, who loses their sense of neighborhood attachment? Drawing on Antonsich's (2010) distinction between place-belongingness and the politics of belonging, this study examines how local exclusionary sentiment shaped neighborhood attachment among White British residents, EU immigrants, and non-EU immigrants in England over the decade spanning the 2016 EU referendum. Antonsich's framework implies that when the politics of belonging shifts against a group, their place-belongingness should erode. But who is affected, through what mechanisms, and whether integration is protective or creates vulnerability remain open questions.

I use four waves (2009-2019) of Understanding Society, fitting crossed multilevel models to approximately 105,000 observations from 47,000 individuals nested within neighborhoods and local authorities. Leave vote share proxies local exclusionary sentiment. Models progressively add individual-level material controls and area-level characteristics, with a three-way interaction (Leave vote, group, and wave) testing whether local political context became more salient over time. A balanced panel (n = 12,161) rules out compositional change, and arrival cohort models test differential sensitivity among established versus recent immigrants.

Results show that group differences in belonging are largely explained by material factors, rather than group membership itself. Second, the association between local Leave vote and lower belonging was not present in 2009 but strengthened significantly by the final wave in 2018, and this growing association was uniform across all three groups rather than concentrated among immigrants. Third, established pre-2000 EU immigrants experienced steeper belonging declines than recent arrivals, consistent with the integration paradox extending to place-belongingness. Together, these findings recast the politics of belonging as a community-wide phenomenon: local exclusionary sentiment is associated with lower belonging for all residents, while group differences are better explained by material conditions than by group membership itself.

Author

• Rachael Kei Kawasaki, European University Institute