A Changed UK? Longitudinal Data Analysis Collaborative Project With ScotCen: Charting Changing Public Attitudes And Values Towards the EU and Welfare

Britain today appears more right-wing, nationalist, populist, and more sceptical and hostile towards political institutions that promote commonly agreed goals; the EU and the British welfare state are important cases in point. How can we explain such trends, are such attitudes here to stay, and do they form part of a more general rightward and authoritarian realignment in public opinion? This Collaborative Studentship project with the Scottish Centre for Social Research (ScotCen) will explore these questions and issues using 36-waves of British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey data spanning nearly four decades. The project employs Advanced Quantitative Methods (AQM) and is based upon a secondary analysis of existing BSA data (36-years of BSA survey data) to chart and examine changing attitudes and values in the British population - and changes over time and changes across different socio-economic groups and the UK-countries and regions. In particular, we want to know whether or to what extent Euroscepticism and welfare-scepticism views are related in the national population, and we know whether these changes are related to the changing nature of political values in the British population. Here we will use the validated political scales: left-right, libertarian-authoritarian and welfarism scales that are available in the BSA datasets.