News - BES Findings
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…
What do the 2016 local elections tell us about what might happen...
On Thursday May 5th elections for local and devolved governments took place across the UK. For the main British political parties, each part of the country told a slightly different story. In Scotland it was a bad night for Labour, who slipped to third place…
When attitudes and behaviour collide: how a referendum can upset the party...
By Ed Fieldhouse and Chris Prosser Imagine the following scenario: a referendum in which the major political parties and establishment are arguing in favour of the status quo, against a growing but enthusiastic minority who argue in favour of breaking away from the union and…
Don’t blame young voters: new film from ‘UK in a Changing Europe’
The UK in a Changing Europe programme, which is injecting research based information into the referendum debate, has produced a video for younger people which we feature below. Professor Anand Menon, who leads the progamme, says the decision matters to young people in particular, who…
How we’re (almost) all swingers now
For many decades, political parties have competed furiously for the great prize of British Politics: the affections of the swing voter. It wasn’t that long ago when there were relatively few political swingers: until the 1990s, General Election results really would be won by attracting…
BES Vote Validation Variable added to Face to Face Post-Election Survey
It may be a truism to say that elections are decided by those who turn out to vote but from the impact of local campaigns, to understanding why the polls went wrong, knowing who votes and who doesn’t is key to understanding British elections. The…
Missing Non-Voters and Misweighted Samples: Understanding the Great British Polling Miss
By Jon Mellon and Chris Prosser On Tuesday the inquiry into why the polls went wrong before 2015 election released its preliminary findings. Their main finding agrees with our own research: unrepresentative samples are to blame for the 2015 polling miss. However, inaccurate polling due…