Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner. 

The Scottish Election Study, 2007 (SES) is a major survey of Scottish voters before and after the Scottish Parliament elections on 3 May 2007. The aim of the survey was to explain the electoral decisions of Scottish voters on both whether and how to vote. The survey consists of three different waves. Wave One consists of the pre-election questionnaire, Wave Two is the post-election questionnaire and Wave Three is an additional post-election questionnaire to explore the problems experienced in the election. The SES was originally designed as a two-wave panel survey, with the same respondents surveyed before and after the election. Then, in the light of the unforeseen problems surrounding the elections, in particular, the soaring number of rejected ballots, the ESRC agreed to fund a third wave of data collection. Wave Three was completed in December 2007 in order to explore respondents perceptions of the elections and the problems that arose, and to investigate whether what happened has had a lasting impact on public attitudes. The survey was modeled closely on recent British Election Studies (BES) (held at the UKDA under GN 33066). As with the web components of recent BES, the fieldwork for the SES was conducted over the internet, by YouGov. The post-election questionnaire (Wave Two) replicates the ‘election study’ component of the Scottish Social Attitudes, 2007 (SSA) face-to-face questionnaire (not currently available at the UKDA however previous SSAs are available under GN 33329). This allows for comparison of the results generated by an internet and a face-to-face survey.

Main Topics:

Main topics include:voting behaviourattitudes to parties and leadersopinions on political issues national identityconstitutional preferencessocio-demographic characteristics

Simple random sample

Volunteer sample

Self-completion

Email survey