News - Uncategorized
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…

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…

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…

Three common errors in interpreting voters’ choices
By the BES FactCheck Team Cees van der Eijk (BES and Nottingham) ,Stuart Fox (Nottingham), Mike Addelman (BES and Manchester) Annemarie Walter (Nottingham), Jonathan Rose (Nottingham), Fanni Toth (Nottingham), Fiona Williams (Nottingham), Katia Kolpinskaya (Nottingham), Josh Townsley (Nottingham), Tom Loughran (Manchester) During election night, we…

ITV’s Election analysis by Prof Jane Green
The British Election Study is working with ITV to bring in-depth analysis and understanding of the most unpredictable election in living memory. The British Election Study has provided an unparalleled source of election data and analysis since it began in 1964. ITV are releasing our…

General Election Constituency Forecast Update
By Ed Fieldhouse and Jon Mellon In March we blogged the British Election Study ‘nowcast’ based on preliminary data from Wave 4. We now publish an updated ‘nowcast’ to reflect the latest BES data and the most recent opinion polls. This gives our best estimate…

Will younger voters turnout to vote? By Ed Fieldhouse
There has been a lot of speculation about the turnout of young voters in tomorrow’s General Election. In 2010 only an estimated 44% of the under 25s voted compared to 65% overall. But with a close run and unpredictable election turnout may well be higher…

The Ebb and Flow: How the flow-of-the-vote adds up to a Liberal...
Most political commentators agree on one thing about the forthcoming General Election: it is too close to call. A conference on forecasting the 2015 British General Election, held at the London School of Economics today reveals that twelve forecasting teams (including the BES) all predict…