It is often claimed that Scottish voters are different from voters in the rest of the United Kingdom, that their values lead them to back parties proposing different policy solutions to uniquely Scottish problems, or to back parties who better express a sense of being able to stand up for Scotland’s interests. Central to this claim is a belief in the distinctiveness of the Scottish polity but it is worth asking whether there is evidence of a distinctive decision-making calculus on the part of Scottish voters or whether this is a similar calculus to the one we see in other parts of Britain but which leads Scots to merely make different choices. This paper seeks to answer these questions, by examining the extent to which the ‘national question’ plays a role in the decision making calculus of voters in Scotland.
