Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner. 

The British Election Study (BES) is one of the longest running election studies world-wide having taken at every general election since 1964. The BES explores why people choose to vote (or not) and why they support one party rather than another, as well as wider questions about democracy and political participation. The BES has included panel studies in a relatively small number of recent periods. These panel studies follow the same survey respondents over time in panel study 'waves' of data. Each wave can also be used as a cross-section and surveys include filter variables to find out which respondents are interviewed in all waves, in just one wave or some waves. Panel studies are particularly useful to study within-person change and the evolution of political preferences and electoral behaviours. For more information see the British Election Study website. The British Election Study, 2019: Internet Panel, Waves 1-20, 2014-2020 contains data on waves 1-20 of the 2019 BES, starting in February 2014 and going through to June 2020. The data includes waves that cover the 2015 General Election, the 2016 EU referendum, the 2017 General Election, and the 2019 General Election. Full details of the methodology and fieldwork are available in the technical report/codebook that accompanies the data release. The data includes boosted samples for Scotland and Wales. There are approximately 30,000 respondents in each wave. This End User Licence version of the dataset contains all of the usual variables made available in the public access version, plus Middle Super-Output Area classifiers and SOC2010 occupation codes for each respondent.

Main Topics:

British politics; elections; political behaviour and attitudes

Volunteer sample

Web-based interview