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UK
Referendum Survey Experiments
Funded by a small grant from the British Academy
Principal Researchers: Professor Jack Vowles, Professor Jeffrey Karp
Associates: Associate Professor Dan Stevens, Dr. Sara Hobolt (Oxford), Professor Todd Donovan (Western Washington), Professor Shaun Bowler (University of California Riverside).
The May 5
referendum asks Britons
to choose between different ways of electing their MPs. Using surveys
of people
eligible to vote, our research asks: how effective are referendums on
such
matters in assessing what people really want? How interested and
informed can
ordinary people be on such matters? Will people respond to what
politicians may
have to say? What about the messages coming from the mass media? When
they
vote, are people more likely to think of partisan or particular
interests, or
the good of the entire country? Representing smaller parties more
fairly will
be one of the main arguments for shifting to the alternative vote (AV).
How
well do people understand how the first- past-the post system works?
Will the
experience of coalition government in Britain make it more or less
likely that
people will support a change to AV? This referendum provides a great
opportunity
for probing more deeply into how people feel about how their MPs are
elected,
and the reasons why they might or might not want change.
Our method
uses survey
experiments on three waves of a panel obtained from an
independent field
services provider, Consumer Fieldwork. (http://www.consumerfieldwork.com/),
using a web survey interface provided by Qualtrics (http://www.qualtrics.com/).
Our sample is not
a close
representation of British voters, but provides a foundation from which
we can
track what affects changes in the opinions and intentions in our panel
over the
period of the campaign and referendum, and within which we can
mount survey
experiments that prompt different sets of respondents in
different ways.
The
first baseline wave of our
panel was in the field between March 4 and March 9. Preliminary
tables
are
now
available. The second wave will be
in the field from April 25 to May 4, and the third wave from May 6-15.
Acknowledgements: Thanks are due for assistance from Christian Brieskorn (Consumer Fieldwork) and Chris Adams (Qualtrics).