Separatist Parties in National Parliaments: The Scottish National Party and the Bloc Québécois
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In his study of MPs in the 1993-1997 Canadian Parliament, David Docherty discovered a surprising phenomenon. Ruling Liberal MPs reported that they had more cross-party contacts and a better working relationship on committees with MPs from the sovereigntist Bloc Quebecois (BQ) than from the federalist Reform Party (1997, 91; 93). The Liberals’ experiences1 run counter to the academic literature’s characterization of separatist parties as being opposed not only to the government of the day but to the entire political system and as having an interest in discrediting groups who wish the country to remain united (Sartori, 1971, 33; Keren, 2000, 107-108). It raises the question of how we would expect separatist2 parties to act within institutions which they aim to exit and how we would expect them to interact with parties who seek to prevent such exit. This paper tests the arguments that separatist parties focus on one issue to the exclusion of all others and accordingly isolate themselves from other political parties, acting as if they have no long-term stake in the national institution. Examination of the voting records of Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) and Bloc Quebecois (BQ) MPs in the national legislatures during particularly salient parliamentary sessions3 show a surprising result. Both parties have voting records that put them in the centre of the spectrum on a range of issues, meaning that they co-operate with all the major parties in their Parliament.Furthermore, both parties engage with a range of issues that go beyond the topic of separatism and the concerns of their region. The results also point to an important difference between the two parties: the BQ has a much higher level of voting overall that the SNP. However, supplementary evidence from written parliamentary questions and more recent parliamentary votes reinforces the finding that SNP MPs engage in a range of issues and also shows that their participation in Westminster votes is increasing. I therefore argue that their low voting record reflects contextual factors from the period under examination, rather than a disengagement from the Westminster system.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".