British Election Study 2001/02

Results from the BES Campaign Surveys



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Questionnaires Data from the BES component surveys Results from the BES campaign survey Press Content Analysis from the BES 2001/02 Publications arising from the BES 2001/02

BES Advisory board Contact information Link to election and public opinion sites

Since the election there has been some interest in the variations of political behaviour by age. Click here to see tables showing turnout by age and vote by age.

Each day of the British election campaign, we published data from the British Election campaign study.

The data were prepared for the British Election Study by The Gallup Organization. You may access the response frequencies by clicking on the links below.

The British Election Study is based at the University of Essex. Its principal investigators are David Sanders, Paul Whiteley, Harold Clarke and Marianne Stewart.

Approximately 150 respondents were interviewed by telephone each day of the election campaign by The Gallup Organization. Responsibility for the design and interpretation of the survey lies with the principal investigators.

The BES Gallup survey data are not those generated by the official British Gallup Election Campaign polls. Official Gallup data are published periodically in the Daily Telegraph, and also may be found in poll summaries published by other media outlets.

The daily responses were cumulated over seven days, to give more than 1,000 cases. The cumulative file achieved enough cases for analysis to be done on May 14th. On each subsequent day an extra 150 cases were added, and the earliest cases from the first day of that week were dropped. This produced a rolling cross-section sample and all the analyses on this website are based on these samples.

  • A Methodological Note on Forecasting and the "Adjustments" of Polls

    The Campaign survey results reported here were not intended to constitute a "forecast" of the likely election outcome. We simply reported our results, unadjusted, as they have been supplied to us by our polling agency, Gallup. Clearly, we could have made adjustments to our data, just as many of the commercial polling agencies do, in order to compensate for "shy Tories" or for "tactical voters" or for whatever else we thought might perturb our opinion poll results.

    Follow this     link, where we provide three different examples of how our Gallup data could be "adjusted" to produce a much smaller gap between the leading parties.































  • Click here for the response frequencies May 14th - 21st

    Click here for May 14th - 21st print version Print version of May 14th - 21st data

  • Click here for the response frequencies May 22nd - 29th

    Click here for May 22nd - 29th print version Print version of May 22nd - 29th data

  • Click here for the response frequencies May/June 30th - 3rd

    Click here for May/June 30th - 3rd print version Print version of May 30th - June 3rd data

  • Click here for the response frequencies June 4th - 6th

    Click here for June 4th - 6th print version Print version of June 4th - 6th data




    Data from previous BES studies are available from The UK Data Archive

    • Copyright University of Essex 2001. All rights reserved