Polling and public opinion expert John Curtice recently spoke at an LSE event on the upcoming Scottish independence referendum. In an interview with Democratic Audit’s Sean Kippin, he discusses the prospect of a ‘Yes’ vote, the demographics at play in the election, and an independent Scotland’s political party make-up.
Looking at the upcoming Scottish independence referendum, do you feel the Yes camp can win?
The first obvious thing to say is that we’ve had over 65 opinion polls now, and of all of those only one has ever put the Yes side ahead, and that was back in August of last year. No is ahead and to the extent that every single opinion poll continues to show that is the case the more any Yes vote would come as a shock.
There are two caveats, however. Caveat number one is that the No side’s lead did narrow during the winter, probably to the order of four percentage points or so and to that extent at least the No vote lead doesn’t look as solid now as it did six months ago. The second caveat is that throughout this campaign there has always been a consistent difference between the opinion polls in terms of their estimate of the level of Yes support.
We have now a trio of pollsters; Panelbase, ICM and Survation that tend to put Yes support at somewhere around the 45-48 per cent mark, suggesting it’s a pretty close contest. On the other side, YouGov, TNS-BRMB, and Ipsos MORI have been putting it from around 39/40 per cent to around the 42 per cent mark. Clearly, if they are right the No side still has a very comfortable lead and it’s hard to see how the Yes side could possibly narrow it. Certainly, they would appear to need a pretty remarkable ‘game-changer’ to do so.
Clearly, the expectation is that Scotland is going to vote No, but by how much we have to wait and see. And so, the No side has been put under enough pressure over the last few months that it has felt the impetus to at least come some of the way towards some kind of joint statement about the offer of more devolution in order to shore up the softer end of its support.
There is no doubt that without the support of those people whose first preference is more devolution, the No side will be sunk. It is a crucial part of its coalition so they have felt compelled to at least shore up their support. Certainly I think that what is now true is that the prospect of the No side getting an overwhelming victory, which is what some of them maybe hoped for originally, is now probably remote.
We are talking about a referendum in which there has been a debate for 40 years, for many people it touches on their fundamental sense of identity, and the arguments are being endlessly recycled. In that context, it is very difficult to move the numbers very far, and they’ve only ever moved gradually, even during the winter of this year.
I was wondering about demographics, particularly age demographics. Are the young likely to vote Yes in greater numbers? If so, does that make a future tilt towards independence?
Those people aged 60-65 or so are less keen on independence than those who are younger than that. To that group, you are talking about people who first cast a vote in a time before the SNP were serious players in Scottish politics, in the 1970s, and for whom at least the British Empire is not just something that they read about in the history books but actually saw the sun begin to set on some of the colonies as they were given freedom in the 1960s. So you are looking at a group of people who are somewhat more likely to have a sense of British identity and who are less likely to be in favour of a Yes vote.
Thereafter, the age differences are there, but they’re very gradual and they’re sufficiently gradual that they don’t always show up in every poll given the vagaries of sampling error. And we are also faced with a rather curious finding from a couple of academic surveys which have been done on those that were 14-18 years old a year ago, most of whom will be 16 or older at the time of the referendum.
We have reached this rather curious position where the very youngest age group are not particularly keen on the idea. So, I would therefore then say two things: first, that there probably is a bit of a generational phenomenon to play out and indeed when those who are currently aged 65 or over are no longer in the electorate, the electorate may become a little more favourably disposed towards independence, but the effect is not going to be major.
The second question you have to ask yourself about whether this is going to come back again is if the SNP – or at least those parties in favour of independence – win another majority in the Scottish Parliament. Although it has happened once, given the proportional voting system used in elections in Scotland it is unlikely to happen again. It only happened in 2011 because the Labour Party made an enormous mistake with its election campaign.
It’s perfectly conceivable that the SNP will be the largest party again, and in fact they will be favourites, even following a No vote, to be the largest party in 2016. But, winning a majority – that’s tough, and unless they’ve got a majority you don’t have the pressure from the Scottish Parliament to hold the referendum in the first place, and therefore the Westminster Government is not under pressure to accede to one. The crucial problem for the nationalists is that if they don’t win now, when will they win?
In the event of a Yes vote, what do you think of the party make-up of an independent Scotland? There isn’t a shortage of centre-right voters there, yet the Conservatives are unpopular. Would the SNP take on that mantle?
If Scotland becomes an independent country, it will have to create a set of political parties that are wholly independent of those that currently exist south of the border, although there may well be fraternal relations, as there are between parties with similar ideological hues across the world. Scotland is, in some way or another, going to have to develop its own party system. In some senses, it already has, as it’s very distinctive from England’s.
But you do have to ask yourself two questions: and they do in a sense present something of a paradox. The first is: if Scotland votes yes, why do we need the SNP? The raison–d’être of the SNP is to deliver independence for Scotland. Once that’s achieved, what is the point of the party? As a party with a preponderance of people who at least call themselves social democrats – and you can argue about whether some of the policies they pursued in office justify that description, though some of them like Nicola Sturgeon undoubtedly are – it also contains people who are not social democrats who are indeed on the centre-right.
One classic example, who is no longer in Parliament but was a Minister in the 2007-2011 administration, is Jim Mather. I’ve called Jim Mather a Thatcherite on air and he still talks to me! He agrees and says “you’re absolutely right!” Fergus Ewing is another. I suspect what would happen is that there would be a battle in Scotland for which organisation becomes the genus of a centre-left party in Scotland. Once the current animosities which are undoubtedly there die down, it isn’t obvious why there should be both a Scottish Labour Party and the SNP, both of them supposedly social democratic.
Conversely on the other side, although Scotland’s public social attitudes are somewhat to the left of England’s, it’s a matter of degree. It’s certainly nothing like to the same degree as is true of the differences in the levels of Conservative support. The problem that the Conservatives have north of the border is that people on the centre-right do not vote for them. And the fact they don’t vote for them goes back to them being anti-devolution, being seen as rather English, and the party having all these millstones around its neck.
It would be forced to re-invent itself as a centre-right, smallish nationalist party which people like Murdo Fraser in the party have long intended. Paradoxically, a consequence of a ‘Yes’ vote for independence could be the demise of the SNP and the resurrection of a new centre-right party in Scotland. People don’t always get what they wish for when they vote for constitutional change.
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Note: This article originally appeared at our sister site, Democratic Audit, and gives the views of the author, and not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics. Feature image credit: das_sabrinchen (CC-BY-SA-3.0)
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John Curtice – University of Strathclyde
John Curtice is Professor of Politics at Strathclyde University, and Chief Commentator at whatscotlandthinks.org, an ESRC funded website that offers a comprehensive collection of easily searchable data on attitudes towards Scotland’s constitutional future. For more information via Twitter see @whatscotsthink
Always said from the outset it was a “wont happen” and it wont, a huge waste of money and labour in a time of austerity, lets hope all can quickly put this behind them and move on together
I cannot believe the nonsense written by Curtice. Was he IN Scotland at the time of the Devolution Referendum and was he here during the 2011 Holyrood election?
The devolution referendum showed that YES was nowhere near a majority until ELEVEN days beforehand when there was a general rush to support both YES questions.
See Pic pic.twitter.com/Jp5PcTv8pz.
Maybe Prof Curtice can explain THAT?
And a similar pattern happened during the 2011 Election. Labour looked like runaway winners right up until the last week when again the SNP surged in to a huge lead. Please explain THAT Prof.
Everything that I see happening on the ground now is a copy of what happened in 1997 and 2011 with canvass returns showing bi YES leads and similarly on the Internet. How can Prof Curtice talk about polling without mentioning those results. Methinks he is hiding his head in the sand.
“The devolution referendum showed that YES was nowhere near a majority until ELEVEN days beforehand when there was a general rush to support both YES questions.”
I’m not sure what you think happened in 1997, but I’d suggest making sure you know your facts before launching into a rant next time. The opinion polls showed Yes ahead for months prior to the 1997 referendum. There was no rush toward Yes either – when you exclude don’t knows the June and July polls below are actually higher than the actual result Yes achieved.
Q1 – Should there be a Scottish Parliament?
June 1997: Yes 64 / No 21
July 1997: Yes 68 / No 21
August 1997: Yes 65 / No 19
Then there were six polls in September which all showed Yes over 60%.
Q2 – Should the Scottish Parliament have tax raising powers?
June 1997: Yes 53 / No 28
July 1997: Yes 56 / No 26
August 1997: Yes 54 / No 27
Then there were six polls in September which all showed Yes safely ahead.
http://worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/repository/1997ScottishReferendumAnalysis.pdf
My, my but isn’t it strange that bombasts like you ALWAYS seem to pick data favourable to their case. Why don’t you look at he pic here and educate yourself.
pic.twitter.com/Jp5PcTv8pz
Yes there were values in June and July which were high for both Qs but you will notice that in the (ICM) graph the TRENDS from Jan 1 to 30 Aug for both Qs were clearly sloping well down and that ICM’s poll around 30 Aug, 10 days before the Referendum, was 62% for Q1 and 44% for Q2, the latter Q2 being more appropriate for comparing with the current Indy Ref. But from 1 Sep to 11 Sep, the polling day, there were surges shown by the polls for Q1 from 62% to 74% and for Q2 44% to 63.5%. I wonder where those results came from? Currently the polls are showing a slight UPWARDS trend for YES but results which bear no relation to canvassing returns or other ad hoc polls.
And note that there were similar trends in the poll results well before the election date for the Holyrood election in 2011 with Labour being forecast to win easily…some hopes. However AGAIN there were large surges shown in the polls in the last few weeks for the SNP when it was clear to every man and his dog that the earlier polls were nonsense. Again one has to wonder where those figures came from?
I’m pretty gobsmacked at what you’re coming out with here. You quite clearly said that Yes was “nowhere near a majority until ELEVEN days beforehand” which is completely and utterly wrong – as I’ve shown you directly, whether you want to see it or not. Bizarrely even your own link shows every single poll for question 1 above 60%. How exactly is every poll being above 60% “nowhere near a majority”?
Worse than that, you’re completely misreading the polls in the first place. You’re claiming that the polls showed a “surge” from 62% to 74% in the final 10 days simply because you aren’t eliminating don’t know responses from the polling. A poll of 62% with 15% don’t knows is exactly the same thing as a poll showing Yes on 73%. In fact the average excluding don’t knows of all nine of the polls that I quoted above is 74% for Question 1 – exactly what the final result was (and I haven’t “selectively quoted” these polls, they’re the nine which are linked to in the study above).
I get that you’re obviously a passionate Yes voter and you clearly have a chip on your shoulder about polling being unreliable. That’s all fine as far as it goes, but if you want to make these arguments then 1) make sure you’re quoting the actual results, not claiming that Yes was “nowhere near a majority” when it was actually miles ahead in the polls you’re referring to, and 2) make sure you’re reading the polls correctly and not making bizarre claims about “surges” which derive entirely from you not eliminating don’t know responses when you look at the results.
This has nothing to do with being pro or anti-independence, what you’re writing here is just flat out wrong. If you want to make the argument then get the figures right and people might be willing to listen.
This is one of the better and more rational columns I have seen on the Scottish referendum. I don’t have a strong opinion, nor do I have a vote, and I consider this to be a choice exclusively for the Scottish people, but I am struck by the consistent polling results for the past two years, which have yes/no/undecided at 35/45/20 with minor variations.
I’ve pointed out a few times that for Yes to gain a clear victory, they would now have to convert more or less all the Undecided votes to Yes, with only a few weeks to go to the vote.
And there are some serious difficulties with that. First, they have been unable to convert Undecideds for two years, so doing so in the next few weeks looks a bit unlikely. Secondly, in polls that show a lower percentage of Undecided votes, there is no noticeable surge to Yes, and No still have a comfortable lead. Third, a reasonable expectation would be that the remaining Undecided will either stay home on voting day, in which case Yes loses 35/45, or they do vote, but split fifty/fifty, in which case yes loses 45/55.
And appeals to previous votes don’t help, because this time there is an additional source of uncertainty, which is the question of Government revenue. In previous votes, Scots were voting for which party would get to spend Scottish Government revenue whose amount was known in advance. In this vote the big unknown is what Scottish Government revenue would be in the event of Independence, and that’s what the SNP don’t want to discuss, meaning that whether you like them or not, they are not addressing the biggest single uncertainty in the referendum.