Policy Preferences

Abstract

There are four particular reasons to analyse Scottish policy preferences as distinct from the political values which we looked at in Chapter Four. The first is that policy is the practical effect of values. Thus when people place themselves on a scale running from left to right, the practical political effect of that will be to influence their attitudes to such policy areas as redistributing wealth or supporting comprehensive education. Scales of values may give more consistent measures of attitudes (Evans et al, 1996), but they do not give us answers to how people judge more immediate questions of current policy. In any case, testing that the patterns detected for value scales can also be found in attitudes to distinct items of policy tends to validate the scales themselves, because it grounds them in practical politics.