Do Survey Respondents and Non-Respondents Differ? Ecological Analyses of the 2005 British Election Study
Ron Johnston and Richard HarrisUniversity of Bristol
An issue of growing concern in studies of voting patterns using survey data is the falling response rate achieved by face-to-face surveys.1The 2005 British Election Study (BES) pre-campaign survey achieved interviews with 60.5% of the 5935 eligible individuals from the 6450 addresses sampled – a drop of nearly 15 percentage points over the average for the BES surveys undertaken in the 1960s and some 10 points over those in the 1970s (Scarbrough...