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

英国首相戴维·卡梅伦宣布，将迅速将权力移交给苏格兰议会，并对威斯敏斯特的运作进行根本性改变。卡梅伦成立史密斯委员会考虑前者，并委托威廉·黑格(下议院领袖)考虑后者，这是由苏格兰独立公投引发的。具体地说，它们是以反对独立的三党领导人在这场运动的最后几天作出的承诺为基础的。目前的计划包括英国政府在2015年1月25日之前发布一份命令文件(10月13日发布)和立法草案，以及可能在12月底之前在下议院就“英格兰法律的英格兰投票”问题进行投票。时间表很紧。在全民投票辩论提高了公众对宪法问题的认识的背景下，事态也在发展。拟议的研究将有助于确保这一过程得到经验性的信息，并准确地捕捉和报告公众对这些问题的态度。研究将涉及两套协调的数据收集。第一次是与政治决策者、公务员和活动人士进行精英访谈，他们塑造了公众辩论，确立了他们修改宪法的目标。第二项是通过一个在线小组对约7500名受访者进行代表性调查，以确定公众对宪法改革的主要关切是什么。通过将这两个研究线索结合起来，我们将确定精英和公众态度之间的关键区别和相似之处。这项研究将对帮助克服快速政治进程的趋势至关重要，这种趋势是由精英决策者推动的，公众参与的空间很小。因此，我们的研究将被用来在2015年威斯敏斯特选举前几个月为辩论提供信息，并用关于精英们对宪法改革问题的框架与大多数人认为重要的问题之间的分歧和相似之处的实证事实来影响公众和媒体话语。为了有力地比较精英和公众的态度，我们将首先进行精英的初步采访，以确定这些参与者对宪法改革的主导思想。这些将被用来在大规模调查中制定问题，确保调查受访者参与精英受访者的意见。随后，我们将反其道而行之，在进一步的访谈中，利用调查结果，明确调查他们对自己与公众态度之间的差异和相似之处的反应。这项调查的设计方式是为了确保有足够的数据来比较英国各地的态度。这将使威尔士、北爱尔兰、苏格兰和英格兰不同地区的态度有所不同。这样做将使我们能够指出特定领域的政治态度可能与其他领域的政治态度有何不同，以及它们与精英话语中对该问题的主导框架的侧重点如何不同。我们将对16-17岁的年轻人进行更大规模的抽样调查，以调查他们的政治态度，为扩大投票权的辩论做出贡献。苏格兰独立公投背景下的研究表明，年轻人在允许投票后对从政非常感兴趣。我们将调查有关年轻人政治兴趣和参与度的调查结果是否可以在英国各地以及大选之前复制，而不是在全民公投等特殊情况下复制。有了这些信息，我们将能够为关于降低投票年龄的辩论做出贡献，埃德·米利班德(工党领袖)和苏格兰民族党(以及其他人)已经表示支持这一举措。

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.