The Scottish Parliament opened in 1999. This devolution of powers has created a mechanism by which public policy may become more responsive to the needs of the Scottish people, and over time it is likely to create major differences in policy relative to the rest of the UK. One aspect of the evaluation of the impacts of these new policies is comparative research, with the developments in Scotland being compared with those in other areas of the UK.

The main aim of this book is to demonstrate how data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) can be used to examine, on a consistent basis, a variety of social, economic and political differences between Scotland and other regions of the UK that are relevant for policy evaluation and formulation. The comparative studies in this book provide an important ‘baseline’ for analysing the impacts of subsequent differential developments in policy arising out of devolution. They allow us to address the question of whether Scots behave differently despite similar policy regimes in Scotland and the rest of the UK, or the same, despite some pre-existing differences in policy. If you are going to assess the impact of devolution in the future you need an empirical baseline showing how Scotland and England differed on many dimensions before devolution.

Identification of these differences is also crucial if policy is going to be pursued by the Scottish Executive aimed at narrowing those differences that represent ‘disadvantage’. Hitherto, we were in the dark about the nature and size of these differences, in part because of the lack of good comparative data. The data gap has been filled to a significant extent by the ‘booster samples’ of the BHPS for Scotland, which has produced a representative sample of about 3,500 Scots who have been interviewed annually since 1999. Most of the studies in the book use the first two ‘waves’ of this enhanced sample – 1999 and 2000 – in conjunction with data from the rest of Britain from the main BHPS. However, the chapters are not only indicative of what can be done with the BHPS and of the policy baseline; they are also thorough empirical investigations of topics of interest to many researchers in a wide range of disciplines, and each emphasises Scottish– English differences.