News
How Coronavirus Attitudes Fit into Britain’s Ideological Landscape
By Jon Mellon, Jack Bailey and Chris Prosser Early in the year, a buoyant Boris Johnson said that 2020 would be “a fantastic year for Britain”. Instead, in the months that followed, the UK faced its great public health crisis in a century. Over 44,000…
The Government is losing support over its handling of Coronavirus, especially among...
By Jane Green, Geoff Evans, and Dan Snow Competence reputations, once lost, are extremely hard to recover. Furthermore, competence signals can, when large and salient, cut through existing political loyalties and cause voters to switch their support. The voters who are most likely to punish…
Data Update, 7 July 2020
Today we have released an updated version of waves 1-19 of the British Election Study Internet Panel, 2014-2023. This is a routine update intended to fix minor errors and inconsistencies that we and our users have found since the initial release. The changes are as…
Do as I say or do as I do? How social relationships...
There is general agreement that social norms play an important role in explaining why people vote. Despite this the literature on voter turnout has yet to establish the extent to which descriptive and injunctive norms matter, and whether this is conditional on the relationship between…
Data updates
The BES team is pleased to announce an update to the BES internet panel (BESIP) data. This update does not include any new British Election Study data. Rather, it makes some important changes to how the data are structured. Those who have used previous releases…
Should Labour have united to remain?
Tactical decision making was widely discussed in the 2019 election campaign. The issue of Brexit was very important to voters, but multiple parties claimed to best represent either side of the division. Before and after the election, many on the Remain side argued that the…
The Re-shaping Of Class Voting By Geoffrey Evans and Jonathan Mellon
Geoffrey Evans and Jonathan Mellon Class has been front and centre in the 2019 general election. Not as in the 1960s when, as Peter Pulzer asserted, it was ‘the basis of British party politics; all else is embellishment and detail’, but for the very different…
British Election Study 2019 Data Release – Internet Panel, Results File, and...
The British Election Study is pleased to announce the first release of BES 2019 election data. This major release of new data consists of three new waves of our internet panel, an updated results and contextual data file, and data from an expert survey of…
Electoral Shocks: The Volatile Voter in a Turbulent World
‘Electoral Shocks: The Volatile Voter in a Turbulent World‘ by the British Election Study team is published today by Oxford University Press The book offers a novel perspective on British elections, focusing on the role of electoral shocks in the context of increasing electoral volatility….
Boris v. Nigel: The Battle for Brexit Party Voters (by Geoffrey Evans,...
Boris Johnson has staked his hopes on winning over Brexit Party voters to the Conservatives. As Nigel Farage looks set to challenge Boris Johnson’s commitments on Brexit, much depends on who can best persuade these voters in the coming weeks: Johnson or Farage. The Brexit…