The 2015 British Election Study: Voters in Context

Election Study Workshop, Montreal, 25th March 2014

The 2015 British Election Study: Voters in Context

The 2015 British Election Study

Professor Ed FieldhouseProfessor Jane Green

Professor Hermann SchmittProfessor Geoffrey Evans

Professor Cees van der Eijk

The 2015 British Election Study: Voters in Context

Election Study Workshop, Montreal, 25th March 2014

Three successful research funding applications The 2015 British Election Study: Voters in Context

Data collection to enable understanding of the 2015 British election, continuing the series of British Election Studies since 1960.

The Scottish Independence Referendum and the British Voter: an enhancement to the British Election Study Internet Panel

Funded under the Future of UK and Scotland initiative Significant enhancement to the BES online panel study; additional waves in

January and September 2014; enlarged samples in all waves up to Summer 2016 (Scottish, Welsh and English), sample of 16-17 year olds.

55,000 additional target interviews in total.

Enhancing the Impact of the British Election Study Resources for a part-time Impact Fellow/researcher and senior media advisor

providing support for dissemination and engagement.

The 2015 British Election Study: Voters in Context

Election Study Workshop, Montreal, 25th March 2014

BES 2015: Themes, Study Design, Priorities

Disengagement, Accountability and Representation Informs the prioritisation of items e.g. trust, turnout, registration, policy

responsibility and delivery; issue-scales for longer term comparability Research partnerships and engagement, e.g. Electoral Commission, Hansard

Society Sampling design and stratification; minimal clustering, response rates for

hard-to-reach groups; constituency and campaign characteristics, and socio-economic context, etc.

Linking of data, to candidate and campaign characteristics, etc. Need to understand the Scottish Referendum, and other elections.

Understanding the vote choice and the voter in context Spatial context; socio-economic, political and inter-personal context Political and institutional context; sub-national and cross-national elections Temporal context; the need for panel data and long-term comparability The context of survey measurement; within-survey effects and mode effects

Election Study Workshop, Montreal, 25th March 2014

The BES instruments

2015 General Election

Pre

N = 20,000

Post-election face-to-face probability sample

+ mailback inc. CSES module N = 3,000

Post N = 20,000

Scottish and local elections

N = 20,000

Local elections N = 15,000

Twitter data harvest

January 2014

May 2014

September 2014

May 2017

May 2016

Voter registration data matching

2010 election sample

2005 election sample

Base sample N = 20,000

European and local elections

N = 20,000

Independence referendum N = 20,000

Daily rolling thunder N = 650 per day

The 2015 British Election Study: Voters in Context

• Post-linking of data for users• Turnout validation (F2F)• Registration checking

(BESIP)• Constituency data• Local Census data • expert survey for party

placements

• Integrating BES data within a network of complementary studies• Pre-linking of data with

studies receiving and/or likely to receive funding

Harnessing & broadening the value of: BES voter surveys

Data gathering with: Liaison/best practice: Insights from:

British Candidate Study (Campbell, Hudson, Rüdig)

Scottish Election Study (SES) (Carman, SES Team)

Welsh Election Study (Scully, Jones)

Constituency Agents Survey (Fisher, Fieldhouse, Cutts)

Campaign spending data (Johnston, Pattie, Cutts)

Qualitative Election Study of Britain (QESB)

(Winters)

Campaign media content (Stevens, Banducci, Gibson)

Online campaign (iBES) (Gibson)

Proposed study of candidate websites (Milazzo)

Comparative Study of Electoral Systems / World Values Survey /

ESRC’s Understanding Society

Manifesto Research on Political Representation (MARPOR/CMP)

(Budge, Regel)

Party Strategies Study (Cowley, Goodwin)

Scottish Referendum Study (BES/UK Initiative)

Macro-database on socio-economic context

Policy outcome database on lower-level output areas

Constituency database (Norris / Thrasher)

Twitter Study

US National Election Studies, Annenberg Campaign Studies,

European Election Studies, etc.. (Winters)

The 2015 British Election Study: Voters in Context

Election Study Workshop, Montreal, 25th March 2014

• Prioritising established questions• European Election Study module (BESIP

wave 2)• Comparative Study of Electoral Systems:

post election mail back or stand alone survey.

• International advisory board – and liaison with other national election studies

International and comparative

The 2015 British Election Study: Voters in Context

Election Study Workshop, Montreal, 25th March 2014

• User experiments and proposals (‘playground’ items e.g. certainty scales)

• Split sample for alternative questions (e.g. PTV and party feeling scales; European integration position)

• Randomisation of question placement (e.g. party ID, vote choice, MII, trust)

• Randomisation of question object within grid (e.g. party leaders & issues for evaluation of performance & responsibility) and of response categories (e.g. social desirability)

• Psychological characteristics: social desirability, risk taking• Individualised (pre-loaded) questions: who is your local MP?• Discussant network module: focus on turnout and household

relationships (norms, expressive motives, costs).• Political knowledge quiz with pictures • Mapping local community

BESIP innovative features

The 2015 British Election Study: Voters in Context

Election Study Workshop, Montreal, 25th March 2014

• Collaboration with Cara Wong, Jake Bowers and Daniel Rubenson

• Respondent define their own communities (using Google mapping technology)

• Respondent perceptions of neighbourhood: e.g. economic performance, norms of turnout, effect of cuts, legacy of Thatcherism, impact of immigration, social, political and ethnic diversity.

• Equivalent questions about pre-defined geographies (e.g. constituency)

• Potential for linking objective data• To be introduced in BESIP wave 3.

Innovation: mapping project

The 2015 British Election Study: Voters in Context

The 2015 British Election Study: Voters in Context

The 2015 British Election Study: Voters in Context

Four Examples of “Local Communities”

The 2015 British Election Study: Voters in Context

Election Study Workshop, Montreal, 25th March 2014

• Gather tweets (from firehose) during the 2015 campaign by a predefined/responsive list of relevant hashtags and topics

• Indicator of issue salience and emphasis in campaign• Potential for sentiment analysis of positive/negative

tone• Gecoding of tweets for linking with constituency and

candidate data• Gather all tweets and follower information on BES

respondents who provide twitter handle. • Allows comparison of respondents and candidates

Innovation: social media

The 2015 British Election Study: Voters in Context

Election Study Workshop, Montreal, 25th March 2014

• New professionally designed BES website• One stop shop for new BES data historical

data• Data playground feature: create simple

charts & tables • News, blogs, working papers etc.• To be launched in April

Website