Social Structure, Identity and Voting Behaviour

Abstract

In Chapters One and Two we outlined the background to the 1997 general election in Scotland. In this chapter we present the first of our results from the 1997 Scottish Election Survey, a nationally representative survey of 852 members of the Scottish electorate. (Further details of the survey are in the Appendix.) We begin by looking at how the behaviour and attitudes of the electorate in Scotland changed between the 1992 and 1997 general elections; we then go on to look at the reasons people in Scotland gave for their vote at the 1997 general election. In the second part of the chapter we focus on sociological explanations of voting behaviour (Barry, 1970). We focus first on the social structure of Scotland, to assess the extent to which voting behaviour in Scotland is explicable in terms of social location. In this section we look at the impact of a range of indicators of social location to assess their impact on voting behaviour. Second, we examine the contribution of identity to voting behaviour. In this section we are concerned to look at both the influence of identity on voting behaviour and the ways in which different social identities interact to either cross-cut or reinforce each other. In this as in the chapters which follow we try to set the position in Scotland within the comparative framework of the rest of Great Britain. Thus, not only are we concerned with the way these factors influence voting behavior in Scotland but we are also interested in whether these factors operate differently in Scotland from elsewhere in Great Britain. For example, is the effect of feeling a sense of working class identity the same in Scotland as in England and Wales, or is there a greater tendency for those in Scotland who feel working class to support Labour?KeywordsSocial ClassNational IdentityVote BehaviourParty SystemClass IdentityThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.