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改革。卡梅伦成立了史密斯委员会来考虑前者，并委托威廉·黑格（下议院领袖）来考虑后者，这都是由苏格兰独立公投引发的。具体来说，它们建立在反对独立的三个政党领导人在该运动的最后几天所作的承诺的基础上。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，以及在12月底之前可能在下议院就“英国人投票支持英国法律”的问题进行投票。时间表很紧。在公民投票辩论提高了公众对宪法问题的认识的背景下也出现了事态发展。拟议的研究将有助于确保这一过程有经验依据，并确保准确地捕捉和报告公众对这些问题的态度。这项研究将涉及两套协调的数据收集。第一部分需要精英们采访政治决策者、公务员和活动人士，这些人塑造了公共辩论，确立了他们的修宪目标。第二项是透过网上小组，对约7500名受访者进行有代表性的调查，以确定公众对修宪的主要关注。通过结合这两个研究方向，我们将确定精英和公众态度之间的关键差异和相似之处。这项研究对于帮助克服由精英决策者推动的快速政治进程的趋势至关重要，而公众参与的空间很小。因此，我们的研究将用于为2015年威斯敏斯特选举前几个月的辩论提供信息，并通过关于宪法改革问题的精英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经验事实影响公众和媒体话语。为了有力地比较精英和公众的态度，我们将首先进行初步的精英访谈，以确定这些行为者对宪法改革的主导思想。这些将用于在大规模调查中制定问题，确保调查受访者将参与精英受访者的观点。随后，我们将反过来，在进一步的访谈中向精英们展示调查结果，明确调查他们对自己与公众态度的异同的反应。这项调查的目的是确保有足够的数据来比较英国各地的态度。这将有助于区分威尔士、北爱尔兰、苏格兰和英格兰不同地区的态度。这样做将使我们能够指出特定领域的政治态度如何与其他领域不同，以及它们如何对精英话语中占主导地位的问题框架有不同的强调。我们将纳入一个16-17岁的更大样本，调查他们的政治态度，为扩大选举权的辩论做出贡献。苏格兰独立公投背景下的研究表明，年轻人在允许他们投票后对参与政治非常感兴趣。我们将调查有关年轻人政治兴趣和参与的调查结果是否可以在英国各地复制，在大选之前，而不是在公投等特殊情况下。有了这些信息，我们将能够对降低投票年龄的辩论做出贡献，这是埃德·米利班德（工党领袖）和苏格兰民族党（以及其他党派）表示支持的举动。

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.