Scottish Election Survey, 1997. (2nd ed., 1999)

Scottish Election Survey, 1997
The aims of the 1997 Scottish Election Survey are:
to contribute to the construction of a time-series on electoral change at a time when political divergence is one of the key features of political behaviour within the UK;
to model political behaviour and attitudes in Scotland both with regard to Britain as a whole, the nations and regions of the UK, as well as within Scotland itself;
to understand nationalism in Scotland in the wider European context;
to provide a valuable benchmark for assessing the outcomes of Scottish parliament elections and against which to assess future constitutional change.

Main topics
The file contains the data for 882 Scottish respondents from: an hour and ten minutes long face-to-face interview; a self-completion questionnaire (including the CSES international module); geographic information derived from the census; turn-out and electoral registration information derived from a check against the marked-up Electoral Registers.

The Scottish Election Survey file is a subset from the British General Election Study Cross-section Survey (held at the Data Archive under SN:3887).
Standard Measures: self-completion Q3a,b,e,f,g,Q7a make up a standard BGES left-right scale; self-completion Q3e,d,Q4b-e make up a standard BGES libertarian-authoritarian scale. libertarian-authoritarian scale.

The British Election Study (BES/BGES) series constitutes the longest academic series of nationally representative probability sample surveys in the country. Its broad aim is to explore the changing determinants of electoral behaviour in contemporary Britain. The surveys have taken place immediately after every general election since 1964. Besides the main election surveys, other datasets have also been produced. For example, some studies have included separate sub-samples for ethnic minorities and areas such as Scotland and Northern Ireland (held at the UK Data Archive (UKDA) under SNs 681, 3171, 3889, 3891, and 4622), and several inter-election panel studies have been undertaken between 1969 and 2001 that follow the same individuals interviewed in the cross-sectional surveys (see SNs 422, 2983, 3888, 4000 4028 and 4620).

Since the election series was originated in 1963 by David Butler and Donald Stokes under the name of Political Change in Britain, 1963-1970 (see under GN 33099), it has been under the direction of a number of academics over time.

1st edition released 2nd July 1998