Qualitative Election Study of Britain Party Leader Evaluations Database, 2005-2024

In each round of the Qualitative Election study, participants were asked to provide the words and phrases they associate with British political party leaders. The data were collected during pre-election focus groups and interviews conducted with participants from England, Scotland and Wales, during the General Election campaigns of 2010, 2015, 2017, and 2019. For the in person data collection, party leader evaluation pre-election component, participants were provided with head shot pictures of the party leaders (depending on where in Britain they lived) taken from the party’s own website. In 2024 the data collection was moved online and participants filled in the words and phrases as part of the application process to join the study.

Participants were instructed to write down words or phrases they associate with each person, and indicate if that association was positive, negative or neutral. During the focus groups, the focus group moderator would lead the group in a discussion of the positives, negatives and neutral qualities of each leader. The data included in this dataset only includes the words and phrases written down by the participants, and not the subsequent discussion.

These data are structure for use in sentiment analysis. Each tab contains a column listing participant’s’ words and phrases as a string variable; the next two columns list the election year and leader, affective evaluations (relating to, arising from, or influencing feelings or emotions) as a string variable, and the affective evaluation as a numeric scale from negative –1 to positive +1. These data are suitable for sentiment and discourse analysis, or analytic generalization – establishing that a concept exists within a population regardless of the number of people who hold it.

The new version contains the 2005 and 2014 supplement data.

Words from the 2005 British General Election are substantively different from the other data. They were collected from the article 'Hearts or Minds: Men, Women and Leader Evaluations in the 2005 General Election' by K Winters, R Campbell in Political Communications: The General Election Campaign of 2005, 184-202. Words coded as 1 indicate the respondent thought the word was important in their considerations.

In addition, a supplementary dataset is provided of leaders’ evaluation data from a study with residents of Dundee after the Scottish Independence Referendum in 2014 (N = 287).