Comment

Angus Reid/Sunday Express Poll Shows Little Change

25th August 2013

With the 18th September ‘exactly a year to go’ date coming into view, we can expect a flurry of media interest in the state of the referendum debate – and thus of polling activity too. First out of the blocks is an Angus Reid poll in today’s Sunday Express – though we should note that […]


Tall Tales: Religion and Scottish Independence

15th August 2013

Tall tales are common currency when it comes to religion’s supposed role in Scotland’s politics.  On the one hand, there are occasional murmurings of a continued underlying ‘Protestant’ basis for Unionism in Scotland, as if Better Together marched, willingly or otherwise, to the beat of the Lambeg drum. Yet at the same time we are […]


Wings Over Scotland Crowdsource Funded Poll

12th August 2013

An interesting new development for polling in Scotland over the weekend. Concerned about the paucity of published polls about the referendum, the pro-independence website, Wings Over Scotland, raised from its own readers the funds needed to commission a poll from Panelbase. To the best of my knowledge this is the first time that a conventional […]


Nationalists for No: The Real Referendum Battleground?

8th August 2013

Rather a lot of political excitement has been caused recently by claims that the Labour for Independence campaign was a front populated by current and/or recent SNP activists rather than a grassroots organization consisting of genuine Labour members – see, for example, these articles by Severin Carrell and Tom Gordon. Apart from casting aspersions on […]


Panelbase July Poll

1st August 2013

Just when Scotland’s politicians – and its psephologists – thought it was safe to lie in the sun and forget about the referendum for a while, up popped the Sunday Times last weekend with its Panelbase July poll. So apologies that it has taken us a little while to catch up with what was the first regular public […]


Is the independence movement a child of university expansion?

16th July 2013

One of the great social revolutions of our time has been the expansion of higher education. In the Scottish Election Surveys of the 1970s, just 9% of adults had gained a higher-education qualification. In the Scottish Social Attitudes (SSA) survey of 2012, the figure had quadrupled to 36%. This massive change has occurred in parallel with […]


The Future of England: Implications for Scotland

8th July 2013

The latest Future of England Survey (FoES), conducted annually by the University of Edinburgh, Cardiff University and the Institute for Public Policy Research, is launched today (8 July). It shows that people in England are increasingly dissatisfied with their current constitutional arrangements and increasingly demand the political recognition of England. Some of the dissatisfactions are […]


‘Young people cannot be trusted with political decisions’ – Why actually?

19th June 2013

The minimum voting age for the Scottish independence referendum will be 16 rather than the usual one of 18. Many commentators have expressed strong views on whether this is a good idea or not. On the one hand it has been argued that younger people can judge the merits of or problems with independence just […]


Welcome to the What Scotland Thinks website

19th June 2013

As Scotland decides how it is going to vote in the independence referendum on 18 September next year, the site brings together all the key polling and survey evidence on how the Scottish public thinks their country should be governed. The website features key headline figures from all the recent polls and surveys of Scottish […]


Yes are behind – but how far?

19th June 2013

Eight polls have so far been conducted since the Scottish Government accepted in January that the question on the referendum ballot paper should read, ‘Should Scotland be an independent country’, as recommended by the Electoral Commission.  Every single one of those polls, conducted by no less than five different companies, has put the Yes side […]


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