Arolwg CANS Survey (Citizens after the Nation State), Pobl Cymru yn 2009 / The People of Wales in 2009

In the breakfast seminar, Professors Roger Scully, Director of Aberystwyth’s Institute of Welsh Politics, and Richard Wyn Jones, Director of Cardiff’s Wales Governance Centre, disseminated some of the data collected from the Welsh element of a major, international study of public attitudes in a large number of the regions and stateless nations of Europe, Citizenship After the Nation-State (CANS).

CANS is a unique, collaborative research project, focusing on public attitudes towards governance and government across several European states. It is funded by grants from the European Social Fund and the Economic and Social Research Council of the United Kingdom, as well as several other national funding bodies. CANS has drawn together scholars from Spain, Germany, Austria and France and in the UK, involves researchers from Scotland as well as Wales. (Financial support from the Welsh Assembly Government enabled Wales to be included in the project.) The project incorporated several regions with a long established and distinctive regional or national identity (for example Catalonia or Bavaria), but also regions that are more functional or administrative creations.

CANS examines public attitudes towards the various layers of government that exist in these different regions and nations. While comparisons within particular states are not uncommon, CANS is the first serious attempt to devise a programme of comparative research on public attitudes to governance that examines regions on a broad, European basis. For the Welsh component of CANS, a representative sample of 900 people across Wales were interviewed via telephone, by ICM, in early February 2009.