From Donald Dewar to Humza Yousaf: The Role of Scotland's First Ministers and the Importance of Political Leadership
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The establishment of the Scottish Parliament created new institutions and a political environment which has had lasting implications for Scottish and UK politics, including furthering the rise of the Scottish National Party and the independence question. One central element of this new terrain has been the emergence of the Scottish government and the post of First Minister of Scotland. The latter, the most prominent devolved political position in Scotland, has so far been subjected to little detailed analysis. Drawing on a wide array of material, research and interviews with key individuals, this article explores four aspects: first, the nature of the office of first minister; second, how it has evolved over the past quarter century; third, what various post‐holders have brought to the role; and finally, how they have been influenced by wider contextual factors such as the changing dynamics of party support, electoral competition and intra‐party considerations. The article offers some provisional conclusions about the changing nature of political leadership and the interplay between institutional factors, public opinion and the role of the individual political actors in the twenty‐first century, which has relevance not just for Scotland but further afield.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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".