Time on Our Side: Is Scottish Independence More Likely in the Future?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Scottish independence movement and its leadership have claimed ‘time is on our side’, citing the increased support for independence among younger citizens as evidence a future referendum would be more likely to deliver a ‘Yes’ result. Even amid protracted crises and tumultuous leadership changes within the Scottish National Party, observers still point to robust support for independence among younger voters as evidence of future change. Assessing this claim is important because it clarifies the role of different cleavages in Scottish and British politics and it helps us understand the motivations on both sides for trying to control the timing of any future independence referendum. In this research note, we assess the claim that time sides with the pro-independence movement, using data from the Scottish Social Attitudes Surveys and the Scottish Election Study from 1999 to 2021. Overall, we find limited support for the claim that generational replacement will help the pro-independence movement. Based on data from 1999 to 2021, the most appropriate interpretation is that time will neither help nor hurt the independence movement. Therefore, we need to treat claims on this topic from political actors with caution.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".