News - BES Findings
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….
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…
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…
Labour’s electoral dilemma
In our forthcoming book Electoral Shocks we show that how political parties respond to major political events is crucial to how those shocks affect voters’ choices and volatility, and ultimately which parties win and which parties lose. The Brexit shock is the biggest shock in…
New Class Divides in British Politics
Occupational class was once the fundamental structure behind the British party system, with the vast majority of the working class supporting Labour and the vast majority of the middle class supporting the Conservatives. This link frayed in the 2000s under the New Labour government and…