ESRC funds Scottish Election Study for another five years
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The Scottish Election Study (SES) project has received funding for another five years to continue its work examining the political attitudes and behaviour of voters in Scotland.
The UKRI Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) will support the ongoing study about changing trends in Scotland’s politics into the 2026 Scottish Parliament election and the years beyond, as well as the next UK General Election. New funding will also enable SES to launch a project exploring young Scottish people’s views and their engagement with politics.
Run by partners at the University of Edinburgh, the University of Glasgow, Cardiff University and the University of Southampton, the SES collects attitudinal and behavioural data to identify the drivers of voter choice in Scotland. Professor Ailsa Henderson, in Politics and International Relations at Edinburgh, leads the project.
The funding will enable further development of the SES’s mission to support evidence-led decision making by a range of users of its data, and to ensure various spheres of UK public life have factual information about trends in Scotland.
With the continuing ESRC support, SES will:
- Run surveys on the 2026 Scottish Parliament election and the next UK general election
- Continue the three-times-a-year publication of the Scottish Opinion Monitor (SCOOP) report. SCOOP surveys 1,200 eligible voters in Scotland and tracks the drivers of opinion change between election periods.
- Launch several new innovations, including:
- The world’s first youth panel, in partnership with the Scottish Youth Parliament. The SES team will recruit and survey young people with a co-produced survey. This will provide information about the civic engagement of young people and help to understand generational divides.
- Multi-generational surveys to evaluate the different responses of children and parents.
- Recruitment experiments to target under-represented groups - Continue building national capacity to analyse data, including mentoring early career academics; creating resources for undergraduate and secondary school students; running skills workshops and questionnaires for scholars of devolved elections; and running a range of professional practitioner and public engagement events
- Continue to engage with and develop existing networks with academics, journalists and practitioners, to ensure the data collected reflects the needs of research users.
This work will build on the SES’s previous in-depth surveys. The project has conducted surveys at every devolved election in Scotland since 2007, as well as the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum, and the 2017 and 2019 UK general elections.
The SES recently won the 2025 Pippa Norris prize for best research group from the UK’s Political Studies Association, and a University of Edinburgh Award for Best Impact from a Data-led Project.
Ailsa Henderson, Professor of Political Science at the University of Edinburgh and Principal Investigator of the SES, said: “I am delighted to lead the Scottish Election Study as we head towards important elections in 2026 and beyond. This is an important infrastructure grant for Scotland’s academic community and the SES team works hard to ensure that the data offer an important record of how Scots feel about policies and parties, how they engage in politics and make voting decisions. Our goal is to collect data that meets the diverse needs of scholars, policy makers, journalists and students to enable high-quality research and evidence-led decision making.
“We are big believers in the fact that Scotland and Scottish voting is interesting in its own right, that it deserves to be studied with precision and care, but also that comparing Scotland to other parts of the UK and to devolved territories globally offers critical insights into devolution, electoral behaviour, national identity, governance and democracy. For this reason, we’ve also dedicating more survey space to measures of democratic health and wellbeing, as well as local democracy and engagement, and creating new initiatives to work with young people and improve survey coverage among under-represented groups.
Jan Eichhorn, Senior Lecturer in Social Policy at the University of Edinburgh, said: “I am incredibly excited to be part of the new Scottish Election Study team and particularly looking forward to working with youth organisations in Scotland to create a novel panel of young people to undertake high-quality representative survey work. This groundbreaking opportunity will allow us to study how the political views of young voters change in their late teens and early years of adulthood. Scholars, civil society advocates and policy makers from Scotland, but also far beyond, will be excited to work with this resource.”
Fraser McMillan, Lecturer in Scottish Electoral Politics at the University of Edinburgh, said: "I'm delighted to continue working on the Scottish Election Study, particularly the Scottish Opinion (SCOOP) polling series, which has already achieved widespread recognition as a key source of Scottish public opinion data. The SES provides the platform for Edinburgh and collaborators in Glasgow, Cardiff and Southampton to contribute informed analysis to the Scottish public, to political parties and data users at a time of significant challenge and change."
Professor Alison Park, Deputy Executive Chair of ESRC, said “ESRC is delighted to be providing funding to support SES through the upcoming Scottish Parliamentary election cycle. This funding will enable SES to continue to provide rich insights into voting and political engagement in Scotland, innovating in how they do this, and ultimately providing data that benefits researchers, policymakers, and political communities across the UK.
“The work of SES not only contributes to the study of politics, elections and voting behaviour in Scotland but to broader understanding of key issues by allowing comparisons to the rest of the UK and beyond. We look forward to seeing the work of SES continue over the coming years and to see the continued benefits of the insights that the team provide.”
Useful links
https://scottishelections.ac.uk/