Territorial Polarisation as a Barrier to the Radical Right? Scottish Exceptionalism in Comparative Context

The populist radical right has made advances and even entered government across much of Europe in recent decades. However, parties of this nature have not achieved serious electoral traction in Scotland to-date, particularly compared to other constituent countries of the United Kingdom and neighbouring small nations in northern Europe. In this paper we investigate Scotland's outlier status, arguing that it is mainly a "supply-side" phenomenon downstream of two national sovereignty referendums in the mid-2010s: the 2014 vote on Scottish independence and the 2016 UK-wide ballot on EU membership. These contests restructured Scottish party politics, with support for secession and Brexit cutting across many of the sociodemographic divides that fulled the rise of populist right parties elsewhere at the time. We identify a form of "synergistic" party system polarisation present in Scotland in the past decade, which allowed the Scottish National Party (pro-independence, anti-Brexit) and Conservatives (anti-independence, pro-Brexit) to dominate electoral politics using each other as a foil while these territorial and constitutional issues were resolved. This limited space for radical right challengers until at least the mid-2020s, but a post-pandemic decline in the salience of constitutional questions and heavy losses for both parties at the 2024 UK General Election have removed key structural barriers to populist success. We conclude that it is the Scottish political context - rather than Scottish public opinion - which is exceptional.