In January 2001, the BES team held a mini conference at the University of Sheffield, which followed on from the Democracy and Participation conference.

The conference centred upon two key presentations made by David Sanders and Marianne Stewart. The presentations outlined the theoretical concepts of the questionnaire design and the decision making process behind the selection of questions. The conference delegates then discussed the details of the presentations and offered advice to the BES team. The discussion session was especially useful as the team could draw upon the advice of experts in the field, who have worked on and used BES data in the past.

In April 2001, the British Election Study team organised a second conference, attended by several members of the advisory board. The purpose of the conference was to discuss the content of the second wave of the election study. The post election survey, as the second wave is known, will retain many of the questions from wave one, and include several questions not featured in wave one.

The 2001 EPOP conference, at the University of Sussex in September, provided an early opportunity for the BES team to present data to the user community, and to present initial results to the political science community. Each person attending the conference was able to collect a CD-ROM containing four datasets:

• the campaign data, plus aggregate-level constituency data

• the campaign data, plus filters for the rolling cross-sectional analysis

• the Northern Ireland election survey

• the pre-election cross-section and pre-post panel data