The Constitution Unit has published the final report from its three-year research project examining public attitudes to democracy in the UK. In this post, authors Alan Renwick, Meg Russell, and Ben Lauderdale summarise the report’s findings. The public care about democracy. They want high standards in public life, robust checks and balances, and better education and information about politics. The topics covered in this blog will be discussed in more detail at a webinar on Monday 27 November. Tickets are still available via the Unit’s website, and free of charge.

Public attitudes towards the democratic system matter. If people disengage, their views and interests go unrepresented. If they do not trust those in charge, that makes the careful trade-offs and compromises that are essential to effective policymaking harder.

Over the last three years, we have therefore conducted detailed research into the state of public attitudes towards the UK’s democratic system. The project – called Democracy in the UK after Brexit – has examined attitudes to the system as a whole and to its various components parts. In the wake of unusually intense debates about how the constitution ought to function – prompted by Brexit and a Prime Minister who appeared to reject many established constitutional norms – the project has explored what roles people think should be played by the central components of the system, including parliament, government, courts, and the public.

We have previously published three reports presenting the findings from different aspects of the research: two on large-scale surveys of public opinion, conducted by YouGov in 2021 and 2022; and the report of the Citizens’ Assembly on Democracy in the UK, which met in late 2021. Today we are publishing the project’s final report, which draws these findings together, adds substantial new analysis, and reflects on key lessons for policy-makers.

The 2019 general election is now complete, but there is still plenty to say about the campaign, the rules that governed it, and the new parliament it has produced. Luke Moore summarises the contributions at our final seminar of 2019, where Unit staff were joined by other experts to dicuss the lessons of the election.

On Monday 16 December the Constitution United hosted an event entitled Election Replay with the Experts, at which four leading political scientists, including the Director and Deputy Director of the Constitution Unit, looked back on the 2019 general election. The issues discussed included polling, women’s representation, the rules of the electoral game, and the effect of the election on the new parliament. The event was chaired by Unit Research Associate Lisa James. 

Ben Lauderdale – polling 

Ben Lauderdale, Professor of Political Science at UCL, started the evening by discussing the performance of polling at the election. During the election campaign Lauderdale had been involved in producing the much-discussed ‘MRP’ (multilevel regression and post-stratification) polling used to predict constituency results. His central message was that after two general elections — in 2015 and 2017 — in which some of the polls proved to be significantly out of step with the results, polling for the 2019 election is largely a non-story, as most pollsters were on target in their predictions. Further, the accuracy of the polls meant that the media was (in retrospect and in Lauderdale’s view) discussing the right topics during the election campaign. The most important of these was the prospect of a Conservative majority, but also the specific demographic and geographic weaknesses of the 2017 Labour coalition. While the terminology was a bit reductive and silly, it was not wrong to have focused on the vulnerability of Labour’s ‘red wall’ and Conservative appeals to ‘Workington man’.  (more…)