News
Age and voting behaviour at the 2019 General Election
Recent British elections have seen much discussion about the relationship between age and voting behaviour. British politics seems increasingly polarised along age lines, with younger voters being more likely to support the Labour party and older voters more likely to support the Conservatives. This pattern…
Volatility, realignment and electoral shocks: Brexit and the UK General Election of...
The 2019 UK General Election held on 12th December has been described as a Brexit Election. Boris Johnson called the election with a pledge to “get Brexit done” only months after being elected Conservative leader on the platform of promising to leave the EU on…
Data Release: Wave 20 of the British Election Study Internet Panel, 2014-2023
The British Election Study is pleased to announce the release of wave 20 of our Internet Panel survey. Wave 20 constitutes the first wave of the panel to occur after the outbreak of the coronavirus crisis. 31,468 respondents took wave 20 of the British Election…
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…