On 7 May 2007 the Scottish National Party came first in a national parliamentary election for the first time ever. At the same time in parallel local elections the Single Transferable Vote was used for the first time in Scotland since 1945. This book tells the story of that momentous day. It does so not from the perspective of the politicians who hopes to secure power. Rather it examines what happened from the perspective of the ordinary voter in whose hands the future of those politicians lay.

Shortly after the election, interviewers from the Scottish Centre for Social Research interviewed a random sample of 1,500 people who had been eligible to vote in the elections. In those interviews, which comprised the latest in an annual series of Scottish Social Attitudes surveys, respondents were asked a wide range of questions about themselves, their attitudes and the electoral choices they had made on election day. This book aims to uncover the story revealed by their answers - and thereby assess the true significance of the results that were declared once the ballot boxes had been opened.

Such an enterprise cannot be undertaken without the use of statistics. We could not possibly summarise the answers provided by 1,500 people without them, let alone go on to use them to make claims about what happened amongst voters in Scotland as a whole. Yet for some potential readers any text that makes heavy use of statistics can seem both dry and daunting.