Study title

Surveys of constitutional change process aims to investigate public's attitudes and awareness toward constitutional preferences, constitutional change process and civic culture orientations between the Scottish referendum and the 2015 Westminster elections.These statistics were used to help understand public attitudes and the similarities/differences with elite attitudes. The sampling design ensures sufficient numbers of participants in different regions across the UK. The survey asked people who live in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, their views on specific possible political changes in their areas. In addition to this, young people aged 16-17 years old were over-sampled to investigate the questions around the extension of voting franchise to young people.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...