News - BES Findings
A tale of two referendums – the 2017 election in Scotland
By Chris Prosser & Ed Fieldhouse Only two years after the astonishing rise of the Scottish National Party at the 2015 election, the SNP juggernaut seemed to come to a crashing halt. Although the SNP remained the largest party in Scotland at the 2017 election,…
2017 Election BES Internet Panel Data Released
The British Election Study is pleased to announce the release of the 2017 election waves of the British Election Study Internet Panel. This major release of new data consists of three new waves of our internet panel (waves 11, 12, and 13), and an accompanying…
The Brexit election? The 2017 General Election in ten charts
By Ed Fieldhouse and Chris Prosser Despite Theresa May’s claim that her reason for calling an early election was to get a mandate for the Brexit negotiations, Brexit was conspicuous by its absence during the 2017 General Election campaign as both the Conservatives and Labour…
Has Brexit Broken British Voting?
By Jon Mellon and Chris Prosser Since the 2016 EU referendum, there has been much discussion of whether the UK party system is set to realign around the issue of the EU, just as the Scottish party system has around the issue of independence. The…
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…
What the 2015 Polling Miss Can Tell us About the Trump Surprise
By Jon Mellon and Chris Prosser Tuesday night saw an eerily familiar feeling setting in as it became increasingly clear that the conventional wisdom driven by public polling had greatly miscalculated Trump’s chances just as it had with the UK Conservative party in 2015 and the…
Brexit Britain: British Election Study Insights from the post-EU Referendum wave of...
We are pleased to release new British Election Study insights into the Brexit vote. In this blog we explore some of the deeper features of a nation divided by support for Leave or Remain. These divisions help us to understand the routes to Brexit and…
What mattered most to you when deciding how to vote in the...
We expect election campaigns to follow the major concerns of voters. We also expect campaigns to focus on those issues considered strongest for each respective side. But what did voters think were the most important things when deciding how to vote in the EU referendum?…
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…