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UK
Referendum Survey Experiments
Funded by a small grant from the British Academy and further funding from the McDougall Trust
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 asked Britons
to choose between different ways of electing their MPs. Using surveys
of people
eligible to vote, our research asked: how effective are referendums on
such
matters in assessing what people really want? How interested and
informed can
ordinary people be on such matters? How will people respond to what
politicians may
have to say? Did the
experience of coalition government in Britain make it more or less
likely that
people would support a change to AV? This referendum provided 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
to
track what affects changes in the opinions and intentions in our panel
over the
period of the campaign and referendum, and within which we have
mounted 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. Some
tables
are available. The second wave was
in the field from April 25 to May 2, and the third wave from May 7-9.
The data is now available and can be downloaded for others to analyze in either spss or stata.
Acknowledgements: Thanks are due for assistance from Christian Brieskorn (Consumer Fieldwork), Paul Wilder (McDougall Trust) and Chris Adams (Qualtrics).