FAQs

Please either fill in the contact form or email [email protected].

Please refer to our Terms & conditions on data downloads.

The British Election Study team principal investigators are Professor Ed Fieldhouse (Manchester), Professor Jane Green (Nuffield College, Oxford), Professor Geoff Evans (Nuffield College, Oxford), Dr Jon Mellon (Manchester), Dr Chris Prosser (Royal Holloway, University of London) and research associates Dr Jack Bailey and Ralph Scott (Manchester).

We collect internet panel data and post-election probability sample survey data.

The BES internet panel data is collected by YouGov using an online sample of YouGov panel members.

In addition, after each General Election we also conduct a face-to-face survey using a representative sample of the general population. The 2015 and 2017 face-to-face fieldwork was overseen by GfK, while the 2019 fieldwork was overseen by Ipsos MORI, each time surveying the original 2015 sample.

The 2019 study was designed as a face-to-face in-home survey administered by an interviewer via Computer Assisted Personal Interviewing (CAPI). Fieldwork commenced under the original design but was halted in mid-March 2020, as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. A second phase of research was implemented, following a push-to-web with a postal follow-up approach with the questionnaire self-administered by respondents, either online via Computer Assisted Web Interviewing (CAWI) or on paper (PAPI).

More details are available in the technical report for each survey, included alongside the data on the cross-sectional data page.

Historical BES data can be accessed from the Data download.

Ethnic Minority British Electoral Surveys (EMBES) can be accessed on the UK Data Service website.

Please contact the following press offices for members of the BES team.

Professor Ed Fieldhouse and Dr Jon Mellon: University of Manchester press office.

Professor Jane Green and Professor Geoffrey Evans: University of Oxford press office.

Dr Chris Prosser: Royal Holloway press office.

Not applicable and missing values (due to skipping or routing) are coded as missing (. in stata or NA in R).

Don’t know values are coded to 9999 in the dataset and labelled as “don’t know”.

This means that it is very important to recode “don’t know” values before analysing scales. We chose a deliberately high “don’t know” value so that any diagnostics will immediately pick up on the outlying value.

We name variables in the dataset using descriptive names in camel case.

Naming variables descriptively helps to make analysis code more readable than naming variables by their question number. Question numbering is also less practical in a panel study, where a particular variable may change its position across waves.

Several reasons:

• YouGov’s existing data on panellists
• Data from the Electoral Commission
• Linked data sources

The BES includes much of the information that YouGov routinely collects about all members of their panel:

• Age
• Highest qualification
• Home ownership
• Marital status
• Age left education
• Ethnicity
• Local authority and education authority
• Household income
• Personal income
• Household size
• Number of children in household
• Preferred daily newspaper
• Vote choice in 2010
• Religiosity
• Religious denomination
• Type of organisation worked for
• Big 5 personality measures

• Age
• National Statistics Socio-economic Classification (NS-SEC)
• Parent’s NS-SEC
• Highest educational qualification
• Home ownership
• Marital status
• Age left education
• Ethnicity
• Local authority and education authority
• Household income
• Personal income
• Household size
• Number of children in household
• Preferred daily newspaper
• Religiosity
• Religious denomination
• Type of organisation worked for
• Attending a private primary or secondary school
• Big 5 personality measures

Profile variables are the demographic variables collected routinely about respondents by YouGov. Having these measures from YouGov’s existing data leaves more space for other important questions on the rest of the survey and avoids asking respondents for information they’ve already provided in the past.

These variables have the prefix ‘p_’. Profile variables are collected at intervals determined by YouGov and therefore should not be assumed to be measured at the time of a wave. Profile information with a wave identifier attached indicates that the profile data was the most up to date available at the time of that survey.

Profile variables include the demographic variables for:

• Age
• National Statistics Socio-economic Classification (NS-SEC)
• Parent’s NS-SEC
• Highest educational qualification
• Home ownership
• Marital status
• Age left education
• Ethnicity
• Local authority and education authority
• Household income
• Personal income
• Household size
• Number of children in household
• Preferred daily newspaper
• Religiosity
• Religious denomination
• Type of organisation worked for
• Attending a private primary or secondary school
• Big 5 personality measures

The Moreno scale for Britishness and Scottishness asked respondents whether they felt more British than Scottish.

Our national identity scales instead ask Scottish respondents to place themselves on a 7 point Britishness, Scottishness and Englishness scale. This allows a comparison of more than two identities and preliminary analysis of the Scottish Social Attitudes survey suggested that the two variables separately were better at predicting referendum intention than the Moreno scale.

We also felt that being able to look at the extent to which multiple identities are felt to be more compatible with Britishness than others.

YouGov routinely collects the postcodes of all its panel members. The British Election Study panel respondents are then coded into various geographies based on these postcodes. Currently, we include variables for three levels of political geography: p_pcon is the respondent’s 2010 Parliamentary Constituency, p_oslaua is the Local Authority and profile_GOR is their Government Office Region. Users can merge in any external data they have recorded at these geographies.

Data for lower levels of geography can be accessed via the UK Data Service. For the 2015 face-to-face survey, LSOA identifiers are available, while for the panel study, MSOA was made available in early 2021.

Our innovative Data Playground will allow you to look at BES data and create your own charts, allowing you to look at answers to questions and their relationships without having to have any specialist software.

Please check that the problem is in the original data, not in a new coding or manipulation. If the problem persists, please write a detailed explanation of the problem and send to: [email protected]. We will seek to reply as soon as possible and are grateful for any assistance in ensuring the BES dataset is 100% free of errors.

Our respondents might think that any given issue is the most important facing the country. As such, we allow them to answer this question using an open text box. The problem, however, is that these data can be difficult to analyse. To aid our users, we categorise our respondents’ text-responses into a set of consistent closed categories.

The categorisation process involves computer-assisted trained human coders. Our coders receive one-on-one training and then use a reference guide to ensure that they code the open text responses consistently. For some waves, our coders also used machine learning tools to help speed up the process. In these cases, the software would learn which words tended to be associated with which categories and make suggestions to the coder to speed up the coding process. Discretion always lay with the human coder.

The original open text responses are available in the “Strings” files that accompany each panel release. The coded categories are available as “mii_cat” (where responses are coded into one of fifty closed categories) and “small_mii_cat” (where they are coded into one of twelve much broader categories). We strongly recommend that users verify that the open-ended responses match their interpretation of the category, especially when relying on categories with smaller numbers of responses.

Yes. It is important to use weights to ensure that the sample is representative. As well as making the data reflect the composition of the general population, weights also account for how survey companies collect the sample (for instance, they may over-sample Scottish respondents).

More information on the weights that we provide is included in the documentation that accompanies each dataset. For information on how to weight your data, consult the documentation for your respective statistical software (e.g. SPSS, Stata, or R).

The innovation module contains items that are only asked to subsets of respondents. This includes questions submitted by BES users plus other experimental questions, and cover topics such as a respondent’s propensity to vote for a given party, whether they discuss politics regularly and if so who with, and how they would feel if a son or daughter married a supporter of a particular party (as a measure of social distance).

Note that these questions may also appear in the main survey in subsequent waves.

The British Election Study Team is pleased to invite members of the BES user community to submit applications to include custom designed content to future waves of the BES Internet Panel Study.

Applications should be no longer than 2 pages (A4, font size 12) not including the questions or instruments which may be appended separately. Applications should set out the justification for inclusion in the BESIP, bearing in mind the criteria set out above. All proposals must include full details of the actual questions or experiments (including wording and response categories), rather than examples of possible instruments.

All proposals must be received at least 4 months in advance of the wave in which they are to first appear. This is to allow adequate time for the board to consider proposals, for the team to work with the proposer and with YouGov to finalise and test the instruments.

A decision will normally be made within two months of submission.

For further details on eligibility, criteria and how to submit your questionnaire proposals.