News - BES Findings
New blog: Brexit continues to separate voters, but the Conservatives are losing...
James David Griffiths, Ed Fieldhouse, Jane Green, Geoffrey Evans, and Dan Snow Brexit still shapes political support, despite the collapse in Conservative vote. Recent electoral shocks are splitting the Tories on the pro- and anti-Europe wings of the party, although there was a large group…
Announcing the BESt article award winners
The British Election Study are delighted to announce that A tale of two peoples: motivated reasoning in the aftermath of the Brexit Vote by Miriam Sorace and Sara Hobolt (published in Political Science Research & Methods) is the winner of the inaugural British Election Study…
New Report: Individual Electoral Registration and the British Election Study
In 2014 Individual Electoral Registration (IER) was introduced in England, Scotland and Wales. IER requires voters to register individually and provide individual identifying information, such as their date of birth and national insurance number. It replaced the previous system of ‘Household Electoral Registration’ (HER), whereby…
“Electoral Shocks” Now Free to Download
‘Electoral Shocks: The Volatile Voter in a Turbulent World‘ is now available free of charge to everyone under an Open Access agreement with Oxford University Press, funded by the University of Manchester. You can download the full text as a PDF here. We hope this…
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…
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…
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…
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….