Nationality and national identity

This chapter focuses on different ways of measuring national identity, and examines the relationship between politics and national identity since the late 1990s. It concludes that this relationship is correlative rather than causal. Focusing on elections at Scottish and British levels, as well as the Independence referendum of 2014 and the Brexit referendum in 2016, it is clear that there is no simple relationship between ‘politics’ and national identity, which is best understood as a prism through which politics is refracted. The point is that ‘politics’ is not a passive process, simply the expression of social and cultural attitudes; nor does politics, in turn, determine such attitudes. Whilst in recent years there has been a tightening up of the relationship between politics and national identity—voting ‘Yes’ in 2014, for example, was strongly associated with ‘being Scottish’—these remain relatively autonomous. National identity is best thought of as a cultural prism through which ‘politics’ is interpreted, and helps to explain why political behaviour in Scotland and England has diverged in the last thirty years.