News - 2015 General Election
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….
Is Nigel Farage a Threat to Labour?
Jon Mellon and Geoffrey Evans Nigel Farage’s Brexit party has had a very volatile start. The party went from nothing to winning the European Parliament elections in a matter of months, and has now fallen back to more modest levels after Boris Johnson became Prime…
Women, men, and the 2017 general election. By Jane Green and Chris...
With the forthcoming centenary of the Representation of the People’s Act 1918, it is timely to ask whether women are equally engaged in voting, whether they vote differently to men, and how this might have played out in the most recent general election in June…
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…
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…
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…
2015 and Social Media: New iBES data released! By Rachel Gibson and...
The BES team are pleased to announce the first stage data release from the internet module of the 2015 British Election Study (iBES). This release consists of a daily tracking file compiled by Crimson Hexagon[1] over the course of the campaign. Tweets from the ‘Firehose’…
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…