This study explores how researchers’ analytical choices affect the reliability of scientific findings. Most discussions of reliability problems in science focus on systematic biases. We broaden the lens to emphasize the idiosyncrasy of conscious and unconscious decisions that researchers make...

Parties make hundreds of campaign promises but not all are equally important to voters. Studies of government promise fulfilment accept that some promises matter more than others, but treat all promises equally because they lack an appropriate means of assigning promise centrality. To address...

This research note describes the procedure for constructing continuous measurements of income on the British Election Study Internet Panel using several imputation steps. As with most social surveys not focusing directly on income measurement, the British Election Study Internet Panel uses a...

While elite level and political party ideological positions broadly reflect a one dimensional structure, at the mass level ideological positions appear to be unstructured or multidimensional. In this paper we reconcile this apparent disconnect and argue that economic policy preferences among the...

In the aftermath of the 2017 UK General Election, some claimed that Labour performed unexpectedly well because of a surge in youth turnout. Polling estimates for the size of this ‘youthquake’ ranged from 12 to 21 points amongst 18–24 year olds. Using conventional and Bayesian statistical...

In previous research (Mellon & Prosser, Missing Non-Voters and Misweighted Samples: Explaining the 2015 Great British Polling Miss) we show that the primary cause of the polling miss at the 2015 UK General Election was the undersampling of less politically engaged respondents, particularly...

The pre-election polls for the 2015 UK General Election missed the final result by a considerable margin: underestimating the Conservative Party and overestimating Labour. We analyse evidence for five theories of why the polls missed using British Election Study data. We find limited evidence...

A growing social science literature has used Twitter and Facebook to study political and social phenomena including for election forecasting and tracking political conversations. This research note uses a nationally representative probability sample to examine how Twitter and Facebook users...

Cultural values have become an increasingly important predictor of vote choice in many advanced democracies. Positions on the cultural dimension and the support of populist movements – including Trump and Brexit – have been widely linked with the ‘winners and losers’ of globalization....