Starting in December 2021, the Scottish Election Study have been running a periodic poll called the “Scottish Opinion Monitor“, or “Scoop” for short. This asks a range of different questions, and since November 2022 it has included voting intention questions. These polls are conducted by YouGov, but for reasons outlined below differ slightly from their usual voting intention polls. I noted in February that I would be providing analysis of Scoop output as normal, but identifying it as such separately from other polling.
As I understand it, the SES team were too busy to get a full rundown of their June Scoop out, so I only remembered it at all when the October one hit. I’ve therefore put the June figures into this backdated entry quickly, but without the detail of a full analysis piece. I’ve only got so much time on my hands, so a balance here between making sure there isn’t a gap in the record whilst also not investing time on full analysis of a months-old poll.
The previous Scoop covered the 10th – 15th of February 2023. Changes are shown as (vs that poll / vs last election). Note that Scoop polling uses slightly different methodology to YouGov’s usual polls. As such, YouGov themselves have previously issued the following disclaimer:
“… the voting intention results used slightly different wording and did not include YouGov’s standard turnout weighting and so should not be directly tracked to other YouGov voting intention figures as they are not identical. Instead, they should be tracked to other SCOOP voting intention polls conducted by the Scottish Election Study…“
Ballot Box Scotland follows this advice and therefore reports Scoop on a Scoop-to-Scoop basis, rather than comparing with other YouGov polls. This is in principle similar to how reporting changes between polls follows each individual polling company, rather than comparing between different ones. I also do not include Scoop polls in my rolling averages, given that ordinary YouGov polls feature in that and much more frequently. None of this means that there is anything wrong with any of the data reported here, just that it is tracked as part of a separate series than the rest of the polls I report on!
Note also that whilst Scoop publishes the tables for each poll, these tables do not exclude people who say they Don’t Know, Wouldn’t Vote or Refused/Skipped the question. As YouGov only present their tables with percentages of the sample rather than the exact number of respondents those percentages reflect, it’s not possible to work out a perfectly accurate share once excluding the people who didn’t give a clear voting intention. For this entry however, the SES folk kindly sent me the exact figures.
Regional Vote
Constituency Vote
Seat Projection
Projecting that into seats might give us something like this:
Please see this page for how projections work and important caveats.
Hypotheticals
As ever, the last little bit of analysis concerns those hypothetical and more proportional voting systems that BBS likes to play about with. The use of pure FPTP at Westminster is an affront to democracy, and though Holyrood fares far better, AMS is still deeply imperfect. The examples here simply transpose the poll findings onto more proportional voting systems – the reality is that different systems would of course result in different voter behaviour.
Scandinavian Style Westminster
If you find this or other Ballot Box Scotland output useful and/or interesting, and you can afford to do so, please consider donating to support my work. I love doing this, but it’s a one-man project and takes a lot of time and effort. All donations, no matter how small, are greatly appreciated and extremely helpful.
(About Donations)
