Christopher Jan Carman

The Scottish National Party's outright win in the Scottish Parliament election on 5 May 2011 confounded pre-election polls and commentaries as well as a (broadly) proportional electoral system which was held to minimise the risk of a Nationalist majority moving Scotland to independence. But an extraordinary result in historical context looks much more ordinary when we explore voters' attitudes and choices. According to data from the ESRC-funded Scottish Election Study 2011, the SNP won its majority for that most mundane of electoral reasons: most voters thought that the party would do a better job in office than its rivals, including its chief rival, the Labour Party.

This article introduces Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) as a data-generating tool that can be used to measure the positions of party supporters in multidimensional policy space. It begins with an overview of the state of the art as regards methods for locating parties on a common policy space, in terms of how data are gathered and also in terms of how policy dimensions are identified and measured. We then use a dimension reduction technique to identify latent policy dimensions from a dataset obtained from a VAA carried out in Scotland in 2011. These dimensions are used to map the policy positions of supporters of five Scottish political parties. We argue that this tool allows more leverage on understanding the relative locations of parties ‘in the electorate’ in multidimensional policy space.

While a great deal is known about public awareness of ‘traditional’ methods of political participation, far less is known about public awareness and use of democratic innovations such as Scotland's flagship public petitions system. This paper makes use of a survey conducted in 2009 by Ipsos MORI Scotland for the Public Petitions Committee to examine the influence of resource constraints on public knowledge and participation in the petitions system. While resource constraints such as internet access and lack of time influence the amount of knowledge people have of participation options, the effect is significantly greater on actual participation.

Regional variation in state orientations toward politics has long been a feature of the USA. Yet, while this regional variation has received a great deal of empirical scrutiny at the aggregate level, finding clear and distinct differences in the adoption and implementation of policies across the states based on their dominant political subculture, there has been far less empirical scrutiny given to the underlying foundation of these policy differences—namely shared individual-level orientations toward politics. Here we briefly discuss the empirical evidence supporting the major classification of US political subcultures, that offered by Daniel Elazar. We then explore mass preferences regarding what types of personality traits are seen as most desirable for political candidates to hold—an important dimension in US presidential politics—finding clear regional variation across Elazar's individualistic, moralistic and traditionalistic cultures.

To (re)connect and (re-)engage citizens with their governing institutions, many advanced industrial democracies have adopted innovative reforms designed to ‘transform’ the way citizens interact with public institutions. This article assesses the extent to which the Scottish Parliament's petitioning system, a reform designed to connect the Scottish public with its parliament, influences broader trust in the political system. Using structural equations to model data from a survey of Scottish Parliament petitioners, the article finds that process evaluations far exceed outcome evaluations in influencing petitioner trust in political institutions. Hence simply adopting reforms that allow for ‘civic engagement’ is not enough to improve public support for the political system. Great care must be taken in adopting transformative reforms to ensure that those members of the public who do choose to ‘engage’ with political institutions see procedures as fair and politically neutral.

The extent to which elected officials are chosen to either lead their constituents, on the one hand, or follow their wishes, on the other, is one of the foundational questions that republican forms of government must consider. Contemporary research, however, has thus far offered little analysis of the manner and extent to which mass public preferences vary on this dimension. In this article, we present an analysis that clusters respondents to a large N survey according to the dominant political subculture in which they reside. Our analysis finds that individuals residing in “moralistic” states who are heavily immersed in community churches tend to hold “trustee” oriented representational preferences, while people in individualistic states tend toward a preference for “delegates”.