ABSTRACT
It is rare for political trends in modern advanced societies to be as dramatic as they have been in Scotland in the last half of the twentieth century. What above all marks them out has been the growing divergence between electoral behaviour in Scotland and England, and the emergence of an alternative political agenda north of the border. These trends are both the effect of long-term change in different parts of the United Kingdom, as well as the catalyst for political change in their own right, most notably the establishment of a devolved Scottish parliament in 1999. Such major developments would probably have been unthinkable ®fty years earlier when Scotland was so ®rmly bound into the unitary state that all possibilities of Home Rule seemed dead.
