Differences in mass and elite attitudes to the constitutional change process after the Scottish referendum and before the 2015 Westminster elections

The UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, has announced that there will be a rapid transfer of powers to the Scottish Parliament and fundamental changes to the operation of Westminster. Cameron's establishing of the Smith Commission to consider the former, and tasking William Hague (Leader of the Commons) to consider the latter, were triggered by Scotland's independence referendum. Specifically they build on commitments made by the leaders of the three parties opposed to independence in the closing days of that campaign. Current plans include the UK Government's publication of a Command Paper (published on 13 October) and of draft legislation by 25 January 2015, as well as a possible vote in the House of Commons on the issue of "English votes for English laws" by the end of December.

The timetable is tight. Developments are also taking place in a context where public awareness of constitutional issues has been heightened by the referendum debates. The proposed research would help to ensure both that the process is empirically informed and that public attitudes to these issues are accurately captured and reported.

The research will involve two coordinated sets of data collection. The first entails elite interviews with political decision makers, civil servants and campaigners who shape public debate, establishing their aims for constitutional change. The second entails a representative survey of c.7500 respondents - through an online panel - to establish what the key concerns of the public are with respect to constitutional change.

By combining the two research strands we will identify key differences and similarities between elite and public attitudes. The research will be crucial in helping to overcome the tendency of rapid political processes to be driven by elite decision makers with little space for public engagement. Our research will therefore be used to inform the debate several months in advance of the 2015 Westminster election and to influence the public and media discourse with empirical facts about divergences and similarities between elite framing of the issue of constitutional change and the issues that most people consider important.

In order to compare elite and public attitudes robustly we will first conduct initial elite interviews to identify dominant ideas on constitutional change amongst such actors. These will be used to formulate questions in the mass survey, ensuring that survey respondents will engage with the views of elite interviewees. Subsequently we will do the reverse and present elites, in further interviews, with the findings from the survey to explicitly investigate their responses to differences and similarities between their own attitudes and those of the public.

The survey is designed in such a way as to ensure sufficient data to compare attitudes across the UK. This will allow distinctions to be drawn among attitudes in Wales, Northern Ireland, Scotland and the different regions of England. Doing so will allow us to point out how political attitudes in particular areas may differ from others, and also how they may have a different emphasis to the dominant framing of the issue in elite discourse.

We will include a larger sample of 16-17-year-olds to investigate their political attitudes to contribute to the debate on extending the voting franchise. Research in the context of the Scottish independence referendum has shown that young people were very interested to engage in politics after allowing them to vote. We will investigate whether the findings about young people's political interest and engagement can be replicated across the UK and prior to a general election rather than in a special situation such as a referendum. With this information we will be able to make a contribution to the debate about the lowering of the voting age, a move that Ed Miliband (Leader of the Labour Party) and the SNP (amongst others), have signalled their support for.

This project's urgency lies not only in the need to collect data during the constitutional change process, but also in our core ambition to contribute to the debates preceding the 2015 Westminster election. Specifically we wish to identify gaps and congruence between public and elite ideas, and to bring to the forefront underrepresented views from particular groups of people and regions.

In order to do this we plan a range of activities to maximise the impact of our research:

1. Dialogue-based knowledge exchange events
We will disseminate our research findings as soon as we are able to obtain a significant amount of our data (beginning in February 2015), allowing for several months of intensive engagement with the public debate. Instead of merely running standard academic events to present and discuss our results, we will be integrating partners who our research suggests should be engaged in more extensive dialogue with each other. Where we identify significant gaps between elite and mass attitudes we will invite relevant representatives from both groups that work on the issue in question, or who are representative of groups that are not gaining appropriate levels of access to, or exposure in, the public debate. Beyond merely transmitting and presenting our research findings, these public dissemination events will create settings in which, as a starting point, debate will be stimulated and then taken up by relevant interest groups, media representatives, or decision makers to support further engagement.

2. Intensive media work
Building on the extensive joint experience that the team members have, we will be engaging with online, broadcast and print media outlets to disseminate our research widely. We will use a combination of utilising our own extensive journalist networks across the UK and working together with our university's press office and ESRC support structures to ensure maximum reach. We will begin this process by informing journalists early about the planned activities. We will disseminate research results early in 2015 once they become available and engage journalists further in our knowledge exchange and interaction events throughout the period leading up to the 2015 general election.

One example of our initiative in this regard is the coordination we have begun with David Stenhouse (BBC producer and presenter) and Dave Howard (responsible for several BBC youth politics programmes). Both have expressed a very strong interest in this proposal and both would like to cooperate on using some of our results and expertise for the programmes they are planning throughout the campaign period.

3. Cooperation with external partners
We will actively engage with external organisations relevant to our research focus. We will target organisations that may be able to use our findings to inform their own work, and organisations whose activities and research may be able to inform our work. Such engagement activities would include government (central, devolved and local) where we would offer briefings on the gaps and similarities between elite and public attitudes and discourses. We will also engage with campaigning institutes and organisations, building on the extensive experience all team members have from previous projects and their regular work. For example, we have already engaged in talks with the Electoral Reform Society who would find the research results highly valuable, are keen to contribute to our research design on addressing underrepresented groups and who are willing to contribute to our dissemination events.