Post-devolution elections in the Scottish and UK media

Given their importance in a country‟s political life, elections commonly attract the attention of researchers and media researchers in particular. In the following paragraphs I outline research conducted on election coverage in the Scottish and

“UK” media, following devolution, and I examine the extent to which it contributes to a theorization of the public sphere in Scotland and in England.

The first Scottish Parliamentary election was held in 1999 and, according to Ritchie (2000), the campaign was the toughest in Scottish history until then, with political parties placing great pressure on newspapers. Ritchie describes the background of the campaign and cites extracts from newspaper articles. A more systematic study of this election however is offered by Higgins (2004a, 2004b, 2006), who uses quantitative and qualitative methods to examine the performance of English/UK and Scottish papers in the coverage of the election. He finds that Scottish titles demonstrated a distinct performance in every respect: they offered more coverage of the election, gave it more prominence within the paper, offered their readers more advice and evaluation of the events, were characterized by an explicit articulation of Scottishness, addressing their readers within an inclusive rhetoric of

“homeland making” and requiring of them background knowledge of Scottish politics and culture. He also finds a relationship between the discourse of different Scottish titles and their attitudes on devolution and independence. His approach, which is detailed in chapter 4 of this thesis, discusses issues of democratic debate in the Scottish press during these elections and makes useful comparisons with the English papers.

The report on the 2003 Scottish election, produced for the Electoral Commission by the Institute of Governance at the University of Edinburgh, is a quantitative study of a wide range of English/UK and Scottish coverage of that campaign. It finds that in the second Scottish election, as in the first (Higgins, 2006), Scottish broadsheets continued to devote more coverage, while “UK” broadsheets gave sparse attention, mainly through omnibus reports. Overall though, the report finds that the 2003 campaign was overshadowed by other issues. The study is very comprehensive and insightful in its quantitative analysis, however it provides little discussion of the implications of its results for mediated democratic debate. Moreover, it lacks the potential insights that could be delivered by a qualitative approach to the coverage.

Although research such as the above has offered systematic accounts of Scottish parliamentary election coverage in Scotland and in England, research on the coverage of general elections in the Scottish press after devolution has so far been limited in its scope. Butler and Kavanagh (2002) give a descriptive account of the 2001 UK General Election and the coverage it received in the “UK” press. They suggest that the election was generally seen as boring and journalists were only interested in embarrassing confrontations. In the same volume, Kellas (2002)

describes how Scottish newspapers covered the election, with support from quotes cited from different Scottish titles. He provides a narration of the issues that attracted the attention of Scottish papers, without offering a quantitative account of the amount of attention they received nor a qualitative account of the discourse used in the coverage. The overall impression in Scottish papers, he argues, was that the

“real” issues, such as healthcare, education, safety, would be decided in the 2003 Scottish Election. Schlesinger (2001) gives a similarly brief description of the political position each national Scottish newspaper took and some of the issues they covered, again without presenting a systematic analysis of the coverage.

Scammel and Harrop (2002) provide a systematic, quantitative account of newspaper coverage in front-page stories and editorials for the various issues and political parties in the 2001 election and make a comparison with the 1997 election.

In their report they mention “UK” titles only and, although they state that they also included data from Scotland, no comment is made regarding similarities and differences in the Scottish coverage. The authors conclude that compared to previous elections, the coverage in 2001 was a lot more subdued.

The most comprehensive and systematic accounts of media coverage of the two general elections after devolution are offered by the research team at Loughborough University (Deacon et al., 2001, 2006). These are purely quantitative studies which include not only a general account of the amount of coverage and the most covered issues, but also the amount of coverage of political actors and, specifically in 2005, an explicit comparison between the coverage in England, Scotland and Wales.

However, although they include a range of different media (radio, television, newspapers), the only Scottish newspapers in their samples are The Scotsman, The Daily Record and their Sunday sister papers. This does not allow a very comprehensive picture of the Scottish press to be drawn. Although their report on the 2005 campaign makes specific references to the coverage in Scotland, in both years the central focus of their research is on “UK” media. Moreover, the lack of qualitative analysis of the coverage or consultation with political editors limits the analysis to a quantitative account, albeit a very meticulous and insightful one, and does not allow the interaction of insights from different methods offered by a mixed method approach. Finally, neither these nor the studies of general elections cited earlier, consider the implications of their findings regarding the central concerns of this thesis: the construction of national identity and the performance of newspapers in the democratic debate in Scotland and in England.

This thesis addresses these issues and focuses instead on a mixed method account of Scottish press coverage of general elections after devolution, in comparison to English/UK papers. My project additionally draws theoretical inferences from its findings regarding the performance of these papers within a national public sphere and the quality of the mediated debate in the two parts of the UK.

4. Methodology

1. Introduction

As discussed in chapters 2 and 3, the Scottish press is considered an essential component of a distinctively Scottish public sphere (Schlesinger 1998, Higgins, 2006), however research on how it operates within the context of UK-wide political events following devolution is limited. This thesis studies Scottish press coverage of general elections after devolution, focusing specifically on the 2001 and 2005 campaigns. Although the main focus of the project is on the Scottish press, it also looks at English/UK newspapers and the way their coverage responds to a devolved context. The research thus aims to contribute to the existing debate on the role of the Scottish press in political deliberation, and develop an understanding of the input offered by newspapers to electorates on the two sides of the Scottish border.

My comparison of the performance of newspapers is based on three criteria: the overall amount and distribution of coverage dedicated to the elections and to individual issues; the discursive construction of national identity within the coverage of the most mentioned issues; the access offered to different sources in the debate on the most mentioned issues and the treatment of the main actors. The first criterion involves a quantitative analysis of the coverage, while the other two are based on a critical analysis of a smaller sample. Additionally, a small number of interviews with Scottish political editors who covered the two elections complements the interpretation of the other findings.

A mixed methods design is thus adopted (Greene and Caracelli, 1997, Cresswell, 1999, Tashakkori and Teddlie, 2003, Johnson and Onwuegbuzie, 2004, Cresswell and Piano Clark, 2007) combining different methods to approach the topic from different perspectives. This is because the performance of the press in the public sphere is a complex issue and quantitative or qualitative analysis alone would not deliver an adequate account. In the following sections I discuss the research design chosen, the selection of samples and the individual methods used.