For most Scots a vote for the SNP now is a vote for being Scottish

In 1995, the Labour Party's then shadow secretary of state for Scotland, George Robertson, said that "devolution will kill nationalism stone dead".

Few political prophecies have proved so ill-fated. Tomorrow the Scottish National Party is expected to win an unprecedented third successive term in government in the Scottish parliament.

The SNP, polling at about 50 per cent, is on course to win a majority at the parliament at Holyrood. Such has been the nationalists’ pre-eminence that the election campaign has been a muted affair, with constitutional politics often taking centre stage.

Nine years in power in Edinburgh has done little to dent the SNP's popularity. The nationalists won 56 of the 59 seats available in last year's Westminster election.

In April, 1,400 people queued around the block in the Edinburgh sunshine for the party's manifesto launch. The SNP's telegenic leader, Nicola Sturgeon, smiles down from billboards across the country.

The party’s electoral dominance has emerged relatively recently. When the Scottish parliament was founded in 1999, nationalists were heavily outnumbered by Labour. The SNP had to wait until 2007 for a chance to govern, and even then it was as a minority administration.

In 2011, the nationalists won a historic majority in Edinburgh, paving the way for a referendum on independence.

Party of choice

Even as 55 per cent of Scots voted to remain in the UK, the SNP emerged from the referendum as the party of choice for many former Labour voters who backed independence.

“For most Scots now, a vote for the SNP is now almost above politics – it’s a vote for being Scottish,” said political commentator Iain MacWhirter. “Nicola Sturgeon seems to embody this renewed Scottish identity: smart, presentable, leftish, unapologetic, Scottish without making a thing of it.”

The roots of the SNP's success, however, lie in the decision to create the Scottish parliament itself, said James Mitchell, a professor of politics at Edinburgh University and co-author of Takeover: Explaining the Extraordinary Rise of the SNP.

“Devolution moved the SNP from the fringe of UK politics, struggling to compete for attention for less votes in UK elections, to an alternative party of government,” he said.

Though the devolved Scottish parliament received a raft of new powers under a post-referendum settlement with London, the question of another vote on leaving the union has overshadowed the current campaign. Domestic issues such as taxation and health spending struggle to gain traction among an electorate going to the polls for the fifth time in six years.

For the first time since the creation of the parliament, the SNP manifesto does not include an explicit commitment to hold a referendum on independence. However, during a live TV debate on Sunday, Sturgeon said she “will continue to try to persuade people” of the virtues of creating an independent state.

Pull the wool

Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale has accused the SNP leader of “trying to pull the wool over people’s eyes” on independence.

"So many people in Scotland just want to move on from that referendum of the past," she said. "We have substantial new tax and welfare powers coming to the Scottish Parliament. "

Another vote on leaving the UK is unlikely in the course of the next Scottish parliament, said David Torrance, author of a biography of Sturgeon.

“Sturgeon doesn’t seem terribly keen on having one,” he said, “and it’s up to her at the end of the day.”

In the absence of a contest for tomorrow’s winner, Scottish media attention has largely focused on the battle for second place – and the position of official opposition.

Under the unicameral Scottish parliament’s electoral system, all voters have two votes: one for the 73 members (MSPs) elected in first-past-the-post contests, and another for the 56 seats elected proportionately from regional lists.

With the SNP expected to win the vast majority of constituency seats, the battle for second place has been fought on the list between the once all-powerful Scottish Labour Party and a Conservative party still regarded as toxic by many Scottish voters after decades of de-industrialization.

Recent polling suggests that Labour will hang on to second place, but could lose as many as a dozen of the 37 MSPs won it in 2011.

More than 20 years after George Robertson’s “stone dead” pledge, devolution seems no closer to killing Scottish nationalism.