Over summer 2023 the SES held two essay prize competitions, one for university undergraduates and one for school pupils. Our expert judging panel selected very fine winners for each category and a deserving runner-up for the schools prize in a close-run contest. The winners and schools runner up were announced last month and we are delighted to share all three of these fine submissions here. Undergraduate Prize-winning Essay Many congratulations to Elliot Wortley of the University of Edinburgh for winning first prize in the undergraduate bracket with the essay “Did the Conservative Party’s St ..read more

by Ailsa Henderson with editorial assistance by Fraser McMillan Before Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation as Scottish National Party leader and First Minister of Scotland, the biggest debate inside the SNP surrounded the idea of treating the next UK General Election as a “de facto referendum”. This contemplated a simple electoral path to a future independence: if a majority of Scottish MPs supported independence (in practice, if they returned a majority of SNP MPs) then this would count as a mandate for Scottish independence and, in the party’s eyes, clear the way to negotiations.  Treati ..read more

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 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

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

We wrap up the first batch of our 2021 election posts with a deep-dive on the relative strength of support for Scottish independence versus staying in the union – and our findings might come as a bit of a surprise. Stay tuned for more essential insights on the 2021 election and Scottish public opinion. Header image © User: Kyoshi Masamune / Flickr / CC BY-NC 2.0 It didn’t take the Holyrood election to tell us that Scotland is split down the middle. We already know from the opinion polls that support for independence is, like the SNP as the votes were counted, trembling on the brink o ..read more