Scotland's voters will be surveyed before and after the 2026 Scottish Parliament election and the next UK general election, tracking how their political views shift over time. This matters because Scottish politics operates on multiple levels—Holyrood, Westminster, and local government—and voters often hold different, sometimes contradictory, views on each. Existing data struggles to capture how people navigate these overlapping political worlds, or how young people form their political identities. The Scottish Election Study (SES) fills that gap by collecting consistent, long-term attitudinal data that academics, journalists, and policymakers can use to understand what actually drives vote choice in Scotland. If successful, the SES will inject reliable, factual information about public opinion into political debate and policy-making. Its world-first youth panel, co-produced with the Scottish Youth Parliament, will reveal how civic engagement develops across generations. The data will also help practitioners design better public services and communications by showing how Scots evaluate the economy, government performance, and constitutional options in real time. Methodological innovations—such as experiments to reach under-represented groups and linking survey responses to web-tracking data—will improve data quality not just for Scotland but for comparative political science internationally.
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The Scottish Election Study is an independent ESRC-funded study of political attitudes and behaviour in Scotland. Its primary purpose is to collect attitudinal and behavioural data to identify the drivers of vote choice in the 2026 devolved elections for a wide community of academic scholars and practitioners. Our goal has been to widen access to data, to build interest in the analysis that can be conducted using it, and to build capacity to analyse Scottish quantitative data. We pursue this through dedicated mentoring of early career researchers, resources and awards for undergraduate and secondary school students, skills workshops and questionnaire space for devolved election scholars as a well through a range of practitioner- and public-engagement events. We will collect data before and after the 2026 Scottish Parliament election, but also before and after the next UK General Election in Scotland in two-wave panels that maximize the representation of previous SES respondents. We will also collect data between elections, via our Scottish Opinion (SCOOP) monitor surveys three times a year, to provide essential data about changing trends in Scottish politics. This includes changing constitutional preferences, changes to government approval, evaluations of the economy and public policy and how Scots navigate the multi-level political worlds they inhabit, as well as rapid reaction data on Scottish, UK and international events to track their impact on attitudes and behaviour. This provides valuable data to facilitate evidence-led decision making by a range of data users, and injects useful factual information about the attitudes and behaviour of Scots into public life in the UK. The SES 2026 will involve several methodological innovations. This will involve a world’s first youth panel, aided by new relationships with the Scottish Youth Parliament. We will recruit and then survey young people with a co-produced survey that provides essential information about the civic engagement of young people and helps us to understand generational divides. We will also conduct multi-generational surveys to evaluate the different responses of children and parents so as to identify possible improvements to data quality. We will undertake recruitment experiments to target under-represented groups, and will expand the number of qualitative questions on our survey, bringing valuable new data to qualitative researchers. We draw on UK and international best practice on, for example, survey design, reaching under-represented groups and connecting web-tracking data to survey responses so as to improve the survey architecture and data quality within Scotland as a whole. This also contributes Scottish data to wider comparative debates about democratic engagement, the decision-making calculus in elections and opinion formation Throughout, we will employ our existing networks with academics, journalists and practitioners, as well as our new stakeholder group to ensure that the SES data we collect reflects the needs of research users, that our data and analysis outputs are timely and informative, and will work to enhance capacity to access and analyse ESRC-funded data.
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