British Journal of Politics & International Relations
An uneasy union: The moral and ideological divides of territorial identification in post-Brexit Scotland
2025-11-25
Value differences are often implicated as drivers of European identity, yet little is known about how moral values shape divisions over European identity in multi-level polities. We assess how patterns of moral values are associated with Scottish, British and European identification in post-Brexit Scotland. Fielding an online survey, we use Bayesian regression to evaluate our pre-registered hypotheses about moral expansiveness, moral foundations, and Green-Alternative-Libertarian vs Traditional-Authoritarian-Nationalist ideology. We show for the first time that British identity was negatively predicted by equality concerns and positively by valuing authority and loyalty, while European identifiers exhibit larger circles of moral concern and were ideologically Left/ Green-Alternative-Libertarian. Scottish identifiers were more left-wing but highly valued loyalty. Egalitarian ideologies and moralities have important, sometimes opposite, relationships with territorial identity. Our results shed new light on UK territorial disparities over Europe, with wider theoretical implications for understanding the relationship between values and identity in other multi-level European polities.