The Scottish Government

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Awareness of the Scottish Executive's recent activities

8. The 2004 and 2005 Scottish Social Attitudes surveys asked people how much they had seen or heard about the work of (a) the UK government and (b) the Scottish Executive over the last twelve months. In both 2004 and 2005, 3 in 10 said they had heard 'a great deal' or 'quite a lot' about the work of the Scottish Executive in the last year (Figure 1). A similar proportion indicated 'some' awareness of Scottish Executive activities. However, while around 6 in 10 have at least 'some' awareness of recent Scottish Executive activities, 40% said they had heard 'not very much' or 'nothing at all.' This suggests there is a sizeable proportion of Scottish public whose attention the Scottish Executive has yet to engage.

Figure 1 Awareness of Scottish Executive activities over past year, 2004 and 2005 (%)

Sample size: 2004 = 1637 , 2005 = 1549

Are patterns the same for the Scottish Executive and the UK Government?

9. Raising public awareness of their activities is a problem also faced by other governments. Awareness of UK government activities in the last 12 months is also fairly low - 39% say they have seen or heard 'a great deal' or 'quite a lot' compared with 34% who have seen or heard 'not very much' or 'nothing at all' (Figure 2). However, awareness of UK government activities is slightly higher than awareness of the work of the Scottish Executive. Thirty-nine percent have heard a 'great deal' or 'quite a lot' about UK government activities, compared with 30% who say the same of the Scottish Executive. Further, this gap has increased slightly, from 5 points in 2004 to 9 points in 2005.

Figure 2 Awareness of Scottish Executive and UK government activities over past year, 2005 (%)

Sample size: 1549

Who is most aware of Scottish Executive activities?

10. Logistic regression analysis was conducted to determine which demographic and attitudinal factors are significantly and independently associated with high levels of awareness of Scottish Executive activities (Table 1) ³. Logistic regression is a statistical technique used to summarise the relationship between a 'dependent' variable (in this case, high levels of awareness of Scottish Executive activities) and one or more 'independent' explanatory variables (for example, sex, age, party-political identity, etc). It is particularly useful when explanatory variables are likely to be related to each other (for example, area deprivation and class), since it takes the relationships between these into account in determining which are statistically significant.

11. Key demographic factors related to high levels of awareness are sex and employment sector. As Bromley and Given (2005) note, it has long been the case that women have lower levels of interest in politics than men. Given this, it is perhaps unsurprising that men are more likely than women to have heard 'a great deal' or 'quite a lot' about the Scottish Executive in the last year (38% compared with 23%) (Table 1). Awareness of Scottish Executive activities is also 10 points higher amongst those who work in the public sector than those who work in the private sector, perhaps because the former are more likely to be aware of Scottish Executive policies and action through their work.

12. Attitudes that are strongly related to awareness are: interest in politics, trust in the Scottish Executive and constitutional preference. Those who are disengaged in terms of general interest in politics are unlikely to be aware of the work of the Executive. Fourteen percent of people with little or no interest in politics had heard 'a great deal' or 'quite a lot', compared with 52% of those with a strong interest in politics in general. People with low levels of trust in the Scottish Executive ⁴ also indicate low levels of awareness of its activities (55% had heard 'not very much' or 'nothing at all' compared with 28% of those with high levels of trust in the Scottish Executive). It is not possible to establish from this analysis whether trust is influencing awareness of Scottish Executive activities, or vice versa. It could be that those who are least trusting of the Executive pay less attention to its work as a consequence. Equally, lack of trust may stem, at least in part, from a lack of awareness of what the Scottish Executive actually does.

13. In the context of the current debate in the UK and beyond on waning public interest in politics, these results are not particularly surprising. However, they do underline the uphill struggle the devolved institutions, along with the body politic as a whole, face in meeting the aspiration of the advocates of devolution and engaging the disengaged.

Table 1 Awareness of Scottish Executive activities over last year, by significant demographic and attitudinal factors, 2005⁵

What explains differences in awareness of the Scottish Executive and the UK government?

14. It is possible to argue that higher awareness of government is not always a 'good thing'. Awareness may relate to negative media coverage of government action, for example. However, given the argument, outlined in the introduction, that a reasonable level of awareness is a necessary, if not a sufficient condition for public engagement with government activities, it seems worth exploring possible reasons for the Scottish public's relatively higher levels of awareness of the UK government compared with the Scottish Executive. To do so, we examined:

• which groups of people had relatively higher levels of awareness of the work of the Scottish Executive compared with the UK government and
• which groups had relatively higher levels of awareness of UK government compared with Scottish Executive activities (Table 2).

15. For all of the groups we examined, the proportion who were relatively more aware of UK government activities (column B) was higher than the proportion who were relatively more aware of Scottish Executive activities (column A). However, the size of the gap between these two categories varied significantly. For example, the gap was much narrower for people with high levels of trust in the Scottish Executive than for people with lower levels of trust. Similarly, the gap was narrower for those who favour Scottish independence than for those who would prefer Scotland to remain in the UK without a Scottish Parliament (and, to a lesser extent, those who support the current devolution settlement). Meanwhile, the gap was much wider for those working in the private sector than it was for those working in the public sector. Thus, while awareness of the UK government is somewhat higher across most groups, those with low levels of trust in the Scottish Executive, those who would prefer Scotland to remain in the UK without a Scottish Parliament and those working in the private sector stand out as having particularly low levels of awareness of the Scottish Executive relative to their awareness of UK government.

Table 2 Awareness of Scottish Executive and UK Government activities over past year, by significant demographic and attitudinal factors, 2005⁶

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