How ‘Scottish’ Was this Election?

Abstract

From before the first devolved contest in 1999, there have been concerns about the extent to which Scottish voters would use Holyrood elections to focus on the stuff of domestic politics, and to hold the Scottish government accountable, rather than to pass comment on the performance of the Westminster government or to express their views on recent or future constitutional change. In the terms introduced in the opening chapter, the question was whether these were first- or second-order elections (Reif and Schmitt 1980). We also noted in Chapter 1 that subsequent work has long since refined that simple dichotomy, instead positing a continuum from purely second order to purely first order. In this context, the second-order extreme of that continuum would be a Scottish election entirely driven by events and personalities at Westminster, while the first-order extreme would be one in which politics at the UK level was entirely irrelevant and voters chose purely according to what was going on at Holyrood. Put simply, the question concerns the ‘Scottishness’ of this election.