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Is the Scottish Parliament giving Scotland a stronger voice in the UK?

31. Every year the Scottish Social Attitudes survey has asked whether people in Scotland think devolution is strengthening, weakening or making no difference to Scotland's voice within the UK. ¹⁴ Only a very small minority of respondents have ever said that having a Scottish Parliament is weakening Scotland's voice in the UK (Figure 6). However, since 2000 (when devolution had been in place for a year) views on whether the Parliament is strengthening Scotland's voice or making no difference have fluctuated. Most recently, in both 2004 and 2005 the proportion who said it was making no difference outweighed the proportion who said it was strengthening Scotland's voice. However, there was a 6 percentage point increase in 2005 in those saying it is giving Scotland a stronger voice (35% in 2004 to 41% in 2005).

Figure 6 Do you think having a Scottish Parliament is giving Scotland a stronger voice in the UK? 1999-2005 (%)

Sample size: 1999 = 1482, 2000 = 1663, 2001 = 1605, 2002 = 1665, 2003 = 1508, 2004 = 1637, 2005 = 1549

32. Analysis was carried out to determine which factors are significantly and independently related to whether people think the Scottish Parliament has given Scotland a stronger voice in the UK or not. With the exception of age (younger people, aged 18-24, are most likely to believe the Scottish Parliament is giving Scotland a stronger voice), very few individual-level demographic factors are significant once their relationship with other factors is taken into account. Instead, attitudes towards the success of the Scottish Parliament in giving Scotland a stronger voice are strongly related to other attitudes toward devolution in particular, and to political attitudes more generally (Table 7).

33. The groups most likely to say having a Scottish Parliament is giving Scotland a stronger voice include:

• people with high levels of trust in the Scottish Executive
• people who favour either independence or devolution
• people who think that the Scottish Executive does and ought to have most influence over how Scotland is run
• those who identify with the parties involved in the current Scottish Executive coalition (52% of Labour and 46% of Liberal Democrat identifiers), and
• people with a high level of awareness of Scottish Executive activities.

34. It is not possible to establish from this analysis which of these attitudes comes first. For example, does trust in the Scottish Executive lead people to believe that having a Scottish Parliament is giving Scotland a stronger voice? Or does the belief that devolution has given Scotland a stronger voice lead people to place greater trust in the institutions of devolution? It is also worth noting that party identification is likely to be associated with other underlying attitudes - for example, constitutional preference. However, in fact party political identification is independently significant, even after its relationship with constitutional preference was controlled for in statistical analysis. The fact that higher proportions of Labour supporters believe that devolution is giving Scotland a stronger voice is not simply a reflection of their support for the principle that Scotland should have its own parliament.

35. What these findings do demonstrate is that evaluations of the success of the Parliament in strengthening Scotland's voice are closely associated not only with assessments of devolution in practice (trust in the Executive, awareness of its activities, and perceptions of its influence), but with people's overall support for the principle of devolution in addition to whether their party political views are represented in the Scottish Parliament and Executive.

Table 6 Perceptions of the impact of devolution on Scotland's voice in the UK, by significant demographic and attitudinal factors, 2005

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