The Representative Audit of Britain

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The Representative Audit of Britain brings research on parliamentary candidates together under one umbrella, providing a unique dataset that will help us answer some of the most pressing questions about the state of contemporary British parliamentary democracy. Public discourse frequently returns to the perceived growing political class in Britain, which is seemingly removed from the mainstream of society, self-perpetuating and elitist (typified by the row about VAT on Cornish Pasties, Daily Mail 27/03/2012). However, there is little in the way of data to systematically test these claims. The Representative Audit of Britain will include comprehensive information about the backgrounds of candidates standing in the 2015 British general election, including previous occupation, political experience, biological sex, parental status, ethnicity, religion, age, local connections, education, length of party membership and where possible previous selections/elections. The information about candidates will be combined with constituency data, such as marginality, percentage vote for each party in the current and previous general elections, turnout and economic and social indicators generated from census data. This combined dataset will be a powerful tool for analysing who gets selected and who gets elected, permitting us to examine whether certain groups--e.g. working-class people, BME individuals or women--are more likely to be selected in unwinnable seats or places with large working-class or Black and Minority Ethnic communities. However, these top-line findings may mask more subtle processes that can be examined using this data. For example: Do candidates with local political or national political experience get selected for the best seats? Do these trends vary by party? Does experience as a local councillor facilitate or hinder a political career? To what extent has the rise of the MP's researcher and the special advisor taken over the processes of political recruitment and are candidates in winnable seats more likely to have this experience than others? Do the factors interact together to create a 'typical' successful candidate? Or is this stereotype over-played by the news media? We will combine socio-demographic and electoral data with attitudinal data from a survey of 2015 candidates. In recent years there has been a sharp decline in response rates to surveys of MPs and candidates, likely due to the proliferation of surveys and advent of online survey methods. We aim to maximize response rates via a two-prong strategy. First, to gather as much information as possible from party and media websites, party informants and interviews with candidates keeping the surveys for attitudinal measures. Second, by joining forces with the Comparative Candidate Study and British Representation Study, we will reduce the number of times candidates are surveyed. Combining forces with these and the British Election Study will also allow us to consider UK candidates cross-nationally, analyse change over time and make elite-mass comparisons. The data will allow us to answer questions about the representation of ideas in politics; assessing to what extent candidates and MPs share the ideological perspectives of the electorate and whether this varies by sub-groups of the population and by political party.