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So Who Voted Yes and Who Voted No?

26th September 2014

One of the common features of political polling is that while a plethora appear in advance of an election or a referendum, nobody bothers to conduct a poll afterwards. For newspapers, the most common commissioners, polls are of interest beforehand because they provide a basis for speculating about what will happen when polling day does […]


TNS BMRB Confirms No-Post Games Boost for Yes

13th August 2014

TNS BMRB’s monthly poll is published today. As ever its face to face polling is done over a longer fieldwork period than other polls. In this instance polling started the day the Commonwealth Games were opened on 23 July and ended on 7 August, two days after the leaders’ debate. It thus gives us a […]


Survation Suggest The Games Have Had Little Impact

3rd August 2014

The Commonwealth Games have gone off about as well as the organisers could possibly have hoped. A record haul of medals for Team Scotland and, with just the odd exception, plenty of plaudits for how well the event has been arranged. Even the weather has been kind (at the beginning at least).  It would seem […]


Attitudes to Gaelic and to Scottish Autonomy

25th June 2014

The status of national languages has been a source of controversy in many movements seeking autonomy for a small nation, such as, for example, those in Ireland and Wales. Yet Scotland seems to be an exception. Support for the Gaelic language has never been closely linked with campaigning  for Scottish political autonomy. But does that […]


Can Scotland and the Rest of the UK Get Along?

17th June 2014

Whatever the outcome of the referendum in September, Scotland and the rest of the UK are going to have to find ways of getting along. In the event of a Yes vote, then as envisaged by the SNP at least, an independent Scotland would continue to share a number of institutions with the rest of […]


Favouring not one union, but two: New evidence from the under 18-year olds

12th June 2014

Following on from a similar survey conducted in April and May 2013 a team of Edinburgh University researchers, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council through its Future of the UK and Scotland Programme and working under the umbrella of the Applied Quantitative Methods Network (AQMeN), has conducted a new survey of 14 to 17 […]


Who do we really think we are? On national identity and the census

27th September 2013

The publication yesterday of the second tranche of results from the 2011 Census in Scotland caused a certain amount of excitement.  What caught many an eye was the finding that no less than 62% said that they were Scottish and nothing else, while only just over a quarter acknowledged being British, either alone (8%) or […]


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