Position, salience and rhetoric: the strategic tools employed by the main Scottish political parties in the post-devolution era

Abstract

This article presents an original account of the strategic options available to political parties in the form of the position, salience and rhetoric framework. It builds upon existing accounts of party competition by conceiving of rhetorical justification as a distinct tool in the armoury of party strategists alongside the manipulation of policy position and issue salience. It applies that framework to the case of post-devolution Scotland via a quantitative text analysis of the written record of First Ministers Questions sessions in the Scottish Parliament. It shows how the main political parties in Scotland between them utilised all of the strategic tools contained within the PSR framework in the early twenty-first century up to the most recent 2021 election to the Holyrood parliament. It argues that the tactical choices the main Scottish parties made within this framework can help explain the differing electoral fortunes experienced by those parties in the post-devolution era.