Is social class Holyrood's hidden inequality?

That’s the conclusion contained within an election analysis report prepared by the University of Glasgow.

The study by Shevaun Smith, a PhD researcher at the University of Strathclyde, paints an uncomfortable picture.

“Parties now routinely think about how to improve women’s representation,” she writes.

“They rarely ask the same of working-class candidates: who is recruited, who is selected, and crucially, who is placed in a seat they can win.”

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Of course, many more MSPs will identify as working-class, and will point to their backgrounds as justification. Ms Smith’s analysis uses a very specific metric: prior occupation, or the main job a candidate held before entering politics.

Class background also matters, she said. “Growing up in a working-class household may leave lasting impressions about economic insecurity and inequality, but these differ qualitatively from the experience of navigating working-class life as an adult,” she added.

She names the SNP’s Karen Adam, who represents Banffshire and Buchan Coast, as the only “working-class” MSP under this metric. Before becoming a councillor, Ms Adam - who was contacted for comment - had jobs in hairdressing and retail while raising six children.

Other MSPs may take issue with the finding, but Ms Smith’s research highlights a wider issue.

“What we’ve seen grow up under devolution is a professional political class which I think is dominated, broadly, by people from professional and managerial backgrounds,” said Dr Ewan Gibbs, a historian and lecturer at the University of Glasgow.

“Obviously, those sorts of people make up a far higher proportion of Scottish society than they would have done in, say, the middle of the 20th century, but they are still considerably overrepresented.”

Holyrood, he argued, was designed to be a “workers’ parliament”.

“In the late 20th century, that was what the Scottish trade union movement championed, and I would argue the STUC [Scottish Trades Union Congress] was probably the most significant organisation in terms of the development of devolution,” he said.

However, the vehicles that used to take working-class people into politics, such as trade unions, “have become much weaker”, Dr Gibbs said.

“I think class is uncomfortable, because it gets to the heart of the inequalities and perhaps fundamental unfairness of Scottish society,” he said. “And it is discomforting for people who have in some ways benefited from those hierarchies to have to face up to them.”

James Mitchell, professor of public policy at the University of Edinburgh, has described Holyrood as a “middle-class parliament for a middle-class electorate”.

“The policies that have been pursued have been much more for the interests of the middle-class, but always articulated as if they are progressive, and I think the term ‘progressive’ has lost its meeting in Scottish political parlance because of that,” he said.

“Class is a term that’s rarely used. I mean, it’s just not there.”

Prof Mitchell also said fewer trade union officials are going into politics.

“That working-class experience just isn’t there to the same extent, but that’s a British-wide problem, it’s not just a Scottish one,” he said.

“I suppose where it becomes a Scottish problem is that the Scots, we’ve got this kind of tendency to think of ourselves as terribly progressive. I think we talk a good game in Scotland, our politicians and politics, but don’t act on it.”

The people whose voices have been heard least are working-class women, he argued.

“For those of us who thought devolution would lead to a much more progressive, genuinely progressive - more radical, even - type of politics, it has been a massive disappointment, and gets more disappointing as time goes by,” Prof Mitchell added.

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Christopher Carman, the Stevenson Professor of Citizenship at the University of Glasgow, said class can be difficult to measure. More people identify as working-class than you might find if you looked at more objective measurements, such as occupation.

“There’s all sorts of ways that people identify themselves and think about themselves, and social class is one of the ones that tends to be overlooked a little bit when we’re talking about representation,” he said.

Social class, Prof Carman said, is “in the national consciousness but not in the national discussion”.

“However we go about measuring social class - whether that’s the job somebody had before they entered parliament, the percentage of people with a university education or even, say, what their salary was before they joined parliament - most of the research out there, and there is not a lot of research, shows that the percentage of working-class people in parliaments is smaller than it used to be,” he said.

“And I would think that that likely has ramifications.”

Asked why class may not receive as much attention as other inequalities, Ms Smith highlighted the fact it is not a legally protected characteristic.

It is also “difficult to define consistently and can shift throughout a lifetime”, and acknowledging it as a systemic issue “challenges dominant meritocracy narratives”, she said.

But there is evidence the absence of working-class politicians contributes to a growing disillusionment with politics.

“The lack of symbolic representation has been linked to increased abstention from voting and a widening class divide in political participation,” Ms Smith said.

Her article suggests steps should now be taken to address this.

“Without deliberate action, comparable to the mechanisms that have partially improved gender representation, there is little reason to expect the class composition of the 2031 cohort to look any different,” it concludes.