News - BES Findings
Has Brexit Broken British Voting?
By Jon Mellon and Chris Prosser Since the 2016 EU referendum, there has been much discussion of whether the UK party system is set to realign around the issue of the EU, just as the Scottish party system has around the issue of independence. The…
Is the country coming together after the Brexit Referendum?
By Cees van der Eijk (University of Nottingham) and Jonathan Rose (De Montfort University, Leicester) The necessity of the country coming together after the Brexit referendum has been expressed repeatedly, including by the Prime Minister. For a democratic society to function it is necessary that the…
Updated 2015 General Election Results File
Today we are releasing an updated version of our 2015 General Election results file (version 2.2). The update adds candidate spending data from the Electoral Commission (expressed as a percentage of the long and short spending limits for each constituency) and corrects a small number of errors in…
What the 2015 Polling Miss Can Tell us About the Trump Surprise
By Jon Mellon and Chris Prosser Tuesday night saw an eerily familiar feeling setting in as it became increasingly clear that the conventional wisdom driven by public polling had greatly miscalculated Trump’s chances just as it had with the UK Conservative party in 2015 and the…
Brexit Britain: British Election Study Insights from the post-EU Referendum wave of...
We are pleased to release new British Election Study insights into the Brexit vote. In this blog we explore some of the deeper features of a nation divided by support for Leave or Remain. These divisions help us to understand the routes to Brexit and…
What mattered most to you when deciding how to vote in the...
We expect election campaigns to follow the major concerns of voters. We also expect campaigns to focus on those issues considered strongest for each respective side. But what did voters think were the most important things when deciding how to vote in the EU referendum?…
Are Leave Voters Mainly UKIP? by Jonathan Mellon and Geoffrey Evans
The leave campaign’s surprise win in the EU referendum has led many people to look for explanations for its success and how it managed to perform so much better than UKIP, the party that pushed hardest for Brexit. At first glance, it may seem obvious…
BES and the EU referendum result on ITV
The British Election Study has served the social science community since 1964, and will continue to provide a public resource for understanding the political upheaval our country is experiencing. On Thursday night, using the British Election Study, we called the result of the EU referendum…
The ITV referendum team
Following the tumultuous events of referendum night, here’s a group photo of the ITV news team, with Manchester’s Professor Jane Green, who followed the twists and turns of the night’s events. Professor Green, who is one of the nation’s leading political scientists and a co-director…
The New Face Of British Class Voting, by Jonathan Mellon and Geoffrey...
The British Election Study is releasing data on the occupational position of respondents of the 2015 face-to-face post-election survey. Respondents’ open ended respondents were coded to standardized occupational codes, which are then coded into social class positions. We manually coded all British Election Study face-to-face…