Mark Shephard, Senior Lecturer at the University of Strathclyde, examines the scenario of the SNP campaigning solely on the issue of independence in the next General Election
For academics, survey data will need to keep up with this tussle over mandate definition. We will need to be cautious that we are not priming and so skewing views on a referendum based on question wording preference for seats over votes. It will be interesting to see the different effects re: referendum legitimacy of wording “% seats” versus wording “% votes” (and even versus wording “% vote of the total electorate”). At the moment the emphasis in the Scottish Election Study (see 2021 post-questionnaire) is on discerning the differences in support for a referendum between an open-ended ‘mandate’ question versus number of SNP seats versus number of pro-independence party seats.
Above all else, whatever happens, the voters need to know how the parties are going to measure mandate, and ideally and hopefully they can all agree a consensus definition for the sake of the legitimacy of any outcome. At the moment, there seems to be a lot of inter and even intra-party confusion out there with some politicians talking about majority of seats (e.g. in the Scottish Parliament elections 2021) equating with the will of the people/democracy, while some talk about it being majority vote given the nature of how a referendum works.