Nicola Sturgeon’s surprise resignation last Wednesday coincided with the end of data collection on our latest Scottish Opinion Monitor (Scoop) survey. At first this timing was dismaying, since we missed out on the chance to take the electorate’s temperature in the immediate aftermath of that bombshell development. But the February 2023 Scoop ended up being the final poll of Scottish public opinion taken before Sturgeon’s announcement, which means it’s a useful yardstick of where voters were immediately before (and in a tiny handful of cases, quite literally just as) she decided to leave the st ..read more

On the morning of Wednesday the 23rd of November, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom released its judgement on the ability of the Scottish Parliament to legislate for another independence referendum without Westminster’s say so. To cut a very long story short, the court decided that this move wasn’t within Holyrood’s purview and that UK legislative consent, which had been obtained before the first referendum in 2014, would again be required for any fresh constitutional vote. This put paid to the Scottish Government’s stated plan to hold another referendum in October 2023, since there is n ..read more

Photo by Rico Meier on Unsplash In our previous blog we explained that Scottish voters had less respect for Boris Johnson but felt he was less antagonistic to Scotland and Scots than Margaret Thatcher. This week’s news that the Conservative party has a new leader – and thus the UK a new Prime Minister – might reasonably be seen as a chance for the Conservatives to recover some ground in Scotland given negative attitudes to her predecessor.  Is there scope for new leadership to soften Scottish views of the party?    Recent Scottish Election Study Scoop polling, from a survey con ..read more

It isn’t possible to talk about the rise of Scottish nationalism in the 1980s without encountering the idea that Margaret Thatcher was, ultimately, its handmaiden. The transformational Conservative Prime Minister – in power for that entire decade – is often said to have gutted the country’s industry, used it as a guinea pig for the unpopular poll tax experiment and consistently inflicted policies anathema to Scottish preferences. Thatcher is portrayed as a right wing ideologue whose impositions so alienated the gentle-hearted, left-leaning Scots that they wanted to break their country away alt ..read more

On 14 June 2022 Scotland’s First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, announced the Scottish Government’s new series of white papers, titled “Independence in the modern world. Wealthier, happier, fairer: why not Scotland?”, that would, over a series of weeks (or months), lay out the case for a second independence referendum in Scotland to be held late 2023. By the morning of 15 June, the story covered the front pages of most national papers and dominated the discussion on BBC Radio Scotland’s Good Morning Scotland programme. The presenters pushed a series of pro-unionist and pro ..read more

by Chris Carman The end of March saw the Electoral Commission’s guide to the Scottish local council elections start dropping through letter boxes across the country. Aside from the parties announcing the launch of their campaigns, few things signal the start of an election campaigning season better than the arrival of these trusty leaflets. With the council elections due to be held on 5 May 2022, the purpose of the guide is to help potential voters understand the particulars of the voting process (from registration through to how to vote and even what the ballot will look like) as well as pro ..read more

by Chris Carman, Fraser McMillan and Ailsa Henderson It is easy to forget what was going on in domestic British politics before Russia launched its war of aggression in Ukraine in late February. A short time ago, Prime Minister Boris Johnson was dangling by a thread in the wake of allegations he and various other senior officials had broken their own COVID-19 lockdown rules by hosting parties at Downing Street during periods of severe restrictions on public liberty. The opposition and even members of Johnson’s own party, including its leader in Scotland, Douglas Ross, publicly called on the P ..read more

By Fraser McMillan, Jac Larner and Ailsa Henderson Descriptive data tables available here As part of its ambition to provide regular data to a wider community of users, the Scottish Election Study won ESRC funding in 2020 to start a Scottish Opinion Monitor, or “SCOOP” for short. The cross-sectional SCOOP will run three times a year on top of regular SES panel studies conducted at the time of national elections. It will be used to collect time series data on evolving public attitudes to Scotland’s political parties, the constitutional question and other important issues. This will help us unde ..read more

This morning the Scottish Government’s Cabinet Secretary for the Constitution, Angus Robertson, blamed Brexit and the UK government for the labour shortages currently causing a supply chain crisis across the British economy. There is nothing especially remarkable about this statement: the Scottish National Party’s views on immigration and European Union membership are well-known, as is their proclivity for pointing the finger at Boris Johnson’s administration. In response to this, however, a political reporter at The Scotsman pondered whether or not it was “a vote-winning stance” and speculate ..read more

Three weeks ago, the SNP-run Scottish Government and the Scottish Greens announced that the they had reached a historic power-sharing agreement. With this deal, the two parties firmed up the previous session’s informal and ad-hoc arrangements with a comprehensive joint policy programme, and the Scottish Greens’ co-leaders were handed new junior ministerial posts. While its scope exceeds a typical confidence and supply arrangement, the deal falls just short of a coalition government de jure, with the Greens retaining the ability to distance themselves from certain Scottish Government policies ..read more