The British Election Study for the 2001 general election, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council will be based at the University of Essex. The principal investigators are David Sanders, Paul Whiteley, Harold Clarke and Marianne Stewart.

The British Election Study (BES) has been conducted at every General Election since 1964. A team at the University of Essex has been awarded a contract by ESRC to oversee the collection of data for the 2001 General Election.

The BES covers the following main subject areas: Political preferences and values; economic perceptions; social attitudes; dispositions to engage in different forms of political activity; and individual and household socio-demographic characteristics.

The survey comprises four components:

• Component 1. A 3000-person probability sample, face-to-face survey of Great Britain residents over the age of 18.

• Component 2. A free-standing 4500-person rolling election campaign survey. This will be conducted during the general election campaign. Approximately 150 interviews will be conducted each day, by telephone. Respondents interviewed in the pre-election rolling cross-section survey will be reinterviewed immediately after the election.

• Component 3. A face-to-face panel survey, to be conducted in the 3 weeks immediately after the general election.

• Component 4. A telephone survey of Component 3 panel respondents. This survey will be conducted approximately 12 months after the date of the general election.

The 2001/02 BES has two supplementary components. The first will involve constructing an aggregate, "ecological" data file, based on census and other data, which will describe the enumeration district-level, ward-level and constituency-level context for each of our panel survey respondents.

The second will involve conducting a content analysis of national press coverage of the election campaign. This analysis will result in the creation of a "campaign dataset" which will enable movements in opinion during the campaign to be related to press coverage of the campaign.

The Essex research team has considerable experience in designing and analysing survey data in the electoral politics field.

This experience includes the design of sampling frames, questionnaire design, negotiation with fieldwork agencies, data cleaning and data analysis. All four researchers have published work that makes use of past BES data.

• David Sanders has published a large number of papers which use survey data in order to analyse electoral developments in the UK. In collaboration with Pippa Norris, he designed and carried out an ESRC-funded, questionnaire-based experimental study during the 1997 general election campaign.

• Paul Whiteley is Director of the ESRC Democracy and Participation Programme. He has extensive experience in survey design, most recently involving the ESRC Citizen Audit surveys.

• Harold Clarke has been a Principal Investigator on several Canadian Election Study surveys. In collaboration with Paul Whiteley and Marianne Stewart, he has been involved since 1992 in a project that commissions Gallup to collect monthly opinion poll data on British political and economic attitudes.

• Marianne Stewart is Professor at the School of Social Sciences, University of Texas at Dallas. She has participated in several major survey research projects in Canada and Great Britain. Sanders, Clarke and Stewart are also collaborating on a 4-year project, funded by ESRC, to collect monthly survey data on British voters’ attitudes towards democracy and their preparedness to engage in various forms of political activity.