Scottish Election Study 2021-2025

The sixth election to the Scottish Parliament is scheduled for 6 May 2021. Scottish elections were already seen both as important and as national elections; since the independence referendum in 2014 they have taken on added significance for Scotland's future. We therefore propose the Scottish Election Study (SES) 2021-25: both a national election study for this key contest and an opportunity to track opinion into and beyond the election.

Two decades of studying Holyrood elections have generated several findings. First, of course, voting in Scotland has become closely aligned with support for independence. Second, this is not the whole story. Other factors, notably the performance of the government on devolved issues and the perceptions of the other parties as willing to stand up for Scotland against Westminster, also play a role. Third, devolved elections matter to voters. They are not widely seen as a chance to take a punt on smaller parties or a free hit at the Westminster government: they are primarily about choosing a Scottish government.

Big questions remain, however - about this election, about devolution and about Scotland's constitutional future. Some of these derive from the fact that this will be the first major British election since the Covid-19 pandemic and the UK's departure from the European Union. Will these sideline or intensify the arguments about independence? Others relate to ongoing or new debates in research on Scottish politics and elections. How do voters decide which level of government is responsible for the state of Scotland's economy, schools and hospitals, and do they reward or punish the right people? Is the Scottish government held accountable for its manifesto pledges or is this all overshadowed by independence? Has Scotland come to resemble the US in terms of 'affective polarisation': a place in which people not only disagree about independence but stereotype, distrust or even hate the other side? Is the poor turnout record at Scottish Parliament elections the result of voters' uninterest or parties' campaigning behaviour?

To address these and other questions, we propose a range of activities generating data to be swiftly shared with the wider academic community. The first is the core Election Study, a two-wave survey of 4,000 Scots conducted in the last month of the 2021 campaign and in the fortnight afterwards. This contains core questions on voting behaviour, expectations of and assessments of the election, as well as numerous measures of background and attitudes helping us to explain vote choices.

How people vote also depends in part on opinions and perceptions shaped in the years between elections. We know voters change their minds about leaders, parties and governments. What drives this - events, government performance, new information, social interactions, and so on - is often less clear. We propose a brand new SCOttish OPinion (SCOOP) monitor, three short surveys per year. This enables us to track opinion over a critical period as well as to pick out the long-term dynamics of electoral choice. It also provides a vehicle for our own and the community's questions and experiments, evaluating, for instance, the extent of polarisation or how far people make deliberative decisions when presented with information.

The SES package contains several other components:

a) election agent surveys to evaluate campaigning in this (post-Covid-19) election and how it differs from Westminster elections;
b) resources for journalists, practitioners, teachers and the public, including constituency profiles, maps, briefing papers, teaching materials and quick access to data;
c) unprecedented collaboration with the Welsh and Northern Irish Election Study teams on questionnaire content, analysis and dissemination;
d) capacity building for ECRs in this difficult climate, including Winter Schools on Devolved Electoral Behaviour to teach best practice, offer mentorship and build networks