Lamont's tale of sound and fury

Seeing as it is the SNP conference weekend, a modest partisan gloat.  Since taking over the good ship Scottish Labour after Iain Gray's iceberg captaincy of 2011, Johann Lamont has made good use of her petted lip. Teacherly, scornful, Lamont has used her two year headship to ravage the SNP's record and motives, striving to puncture the credibility of key figures in the Scottish Government by liberally scattering barbed allegations of incompetence and dishonesty like caltrops. Such is the business of opposition.

Her colleagues have also been worrying away at another partisan meme: "Scotland on pause". Look at these dotty, constitutionally-obsessed Nats, neglecting the governance of the nation to pursue their weird, abstract pipe-dream of independence. We're the bread and butter army. Insert quotidian but touching tale of struggling ordinary folk here. Vote Labour.   

So how's that story going? If Lamont's master strategy was paying off, six years into the Scottish Nationalist administration, we'd expect to find a disgruntled public, still on balance against independence, grousing about how the SNP are getting on with their second term.  After all, it is almost inevitable that the magic fades. That folk become restless and fancy an alternative. But instead? According to the latest Ipsos-MORI poll, canvassed over the middle of September, a thumping majority of folk are still satisfied with how the Maximum Eck and his colleagues are faring in Holyrood.

Entertainingly, it appears that Lamont cannot even persuade her own voters that "Scotland is on pause" and that Eck is seriously bungling his second tour of duty.  Canvassing those who voted Labour in the constituencies in the 2011 Holyrood election - a head on smash with the SNP - the pollster found that a majority of Johann's supporters are satisfied too.

If you can't even persuade your sympathisers and fellow-travellers to share your political diagnosis, you're in a sorry way. As much fun as Holyrood commentators have, chortling over Johann's occasionally droll bruisings of Salmond at First Minister's Questions, strutting and fretting her hour upon the stage, out in the country, it remains a tale full of sound and fury - signifying nothing.

History as tragedy and farce...

There was something historical in the air in this week's For A' That podcast.  For the fourteenth episode of the show, Michael and I were joined by Craig Gallagher, who through the wonders of technology, was beamed all the way from Boston, Massachusetts into our palatial recording studio. Craig, formerly of this parish, is now a doctoral student in history at Boston College.  

On this week's show, does history matter all that much in the independence debate? Are Scots folk with lively historical consciousnesses, or are we alternatively, by dint of our educations, often left essentially clueless about about Scottish history beyond a few selective set-pieces? On a more contemporary note, why did the reference this week to Scotland being "extinguished" in international law in 1707 get several nationalists so hopping mad? 

Also on a contemporary theme, this week's Ipsos-MORI independence poll was chock full of interesting data for the political obsessive to gnaw through. We picked up just a couple of morsels. Is 2013 "Year of the Sturgeon", with Nicola's rising prominence in the Yes campaign and popularity in the country? The big splash from the Ipsos poll was the 58% of 18 - 24 year olds which supported independence. Even if one thinks this finding may be a bit overstated, we also had a blether about why Scotland's callow youth vote might diverge from the constitutional sensibilities of our more grizzled, more independence-skeptical compatriots.

In usual style, you can lend the show your lugs right here, or download it for a more convenient hour via iTunes, or from Spreaker. 

If you've enjoyed the podcasts and would like to make a wee contribution towards our hosting costs, and keep the show on its feet up to 2014, you can bung in a quid or via this link. All contributions, very gratefully received.

Women and Alex Salmond: An academic postscript...

Last week, I took a skeptical look at the received wisdom, echoed most recently by the Economist magazine, that women in Scotland aren't terrifically keen on Alex Salmond. Trawling through polls going back to 2009, and looking at how satisfaction with his performance broke down by gender, I argued that the data suggests something of an "enthusiasm gap" for the First Minister.  Men like him more than women, but Scottish women did not assess his activities in Bute House significantly more negatively than Scottish men.  He comfortably drubs Cameron, Miliband, Clegg, Davidson, Rennie and Lamont amongst both men and women.

In response, one of the authors directed my attention towards a paper very recently published in the academic journal, Political Parties. For those interested and able to access it, the precise citation is: Robert Johns, Lynn Bennie and James Mitchell (2012) ‘Gendered nationalism: The gender gap in support for the Scottish National Party’ Party Politics 18(4) 581 – 601.  The piece focusses on the Holyrood election result of 2007.  According to the Scottish Election Survey for that year, 35% of men voted for the SNP on the regional list, compared to 27% of women. As we saw in the preliminary data released from the 2011 Scottish Election Survey, the SNP managed to close this gap to just 3% in the most recent Holyrood ballot, with 43% of women and 46% of men voting for the Nationalists on the list respectively.

Bracketing these recent developments, the Political Parties article examines alternative explanations for the gap we saw in 2007. (Johns, Bennie and Mitchell's conclusion, incidentally, is that men are more likely than women to vote for the SNP because men are more likely than women to support independence, for whatever reasons).  Amongst the factors considered by the authors was Alex Salmond's leadership. Were women "not keen", or at least less "keen" on him than men?  Here's the critical section:

“Here the SES (“Scottish Election Survey”) evidence comes from a series of leadership ratings on an 11-point like-dislike scale. The mean male rating of Salmond was around half a point higher than the mean female rating, a difference which appears more substantial in the light of the general tendency for women to report more positive evaluations. Salmond was the only politician included in the survey to elicit significantly higher ratings from male respondents. The upshot is that, where leader evaluations are controlled, the net gender gap narrows by around one-third. Two points are worth noting about this. Firstly while females were less positive than males about the SNP leader, they nonetheless rated him more highly in absolute terms than any of the other politicians. The implication is that, insofar as leadership can be account for the gender gap in SNP voting, this is because Salmond won support from men rather than losing it among women. Second, leadership evaluations are likely to be causally posterior to some of the factors already considered. For example, it could be that males preferred Alex Salmond because he led a party to which they were already particularly favourably disposed, perhaps because they share the SNP’s preference for independence. In that case, differences in leadership evaluations are a by-product and not a cause of the gender gap under study here.” [Johns, Bennie and Mitchell 2012, 588]

Quite coincidentally, this tallies rather neatly with the idea of an "enthusiasm gap" captured in the Ipsos-MORI polling on Salmond we were looking at last week, and gives the lie to the Economist's rather sketchy, rather crude assessment of the political sensibilities of female Scots. What is left unanswered, however, is why the devil women remain more reticent about independence than men.  The authors admit they don't know.  Neither do I.

If Johns, Bennie and Mitchell's thesis is correct, however, and the gender gap in SNP support in the 2007 election is attributable to a gender gap in support for independence, the changes in the Nationalists' electoral fortunes between 2011 and 2007 may repay close study for YesScotland.  After all, during this period of time, the party's constitutional policies were basically unaltered.  If the female vote faltered for the SNP in 2007, and more or less caught up with men in 2011, something must have changed. It may well be, however, that the two elections were simply fought in different terms, concerned with different priorities, and women's disagreement with independence was mostly just de-emphasised rather than altered or eliminated as a factor weighing against supporting the Nationalists between their tentative first and thumping second victories.

If something along these lines is the case, and the gist of the Jones, Bennie and Mitchell thesis holds for 2011 as in 2007, the SNP managed strongly to attract women's votes despite their attitudes to independence in the last election. In 2014, YesScotland faces a far more daunting task: to attract women to independence, despite independence. No pressure.

Are women really not "keen" on Alex Salmond?

"Just say yes". The latest edition of the Economist magazine has committed a brief article to the nascent Women for Independence group. Overall, it's a scrappy sort of piece, with much to quibble about in it, its ideas provisionally expressed, and sketchily. That said, every conversation has to start somewhere, and the issues dealt with in the piece are both pressing, and tricky. Why is support for independence lower amongst women than men? And following hotly on the tails of that question, another, more practically-oriented one: what steps can YesScotland and pro-nationalists take to convince more women to embrace independence? 

I was particularly relieved to hear from Kate Higgins that the crudely gendered colour palette which the Economist suggests the group would be employing - bubblegum "pink literature" - is fictional too. No fuchsia mailshots and, tragically, no tupperware. One particular section of the article caught my eye.  Between quotes from Natalie McGarry, John Curtice and Margaret Curran, the author briskly assessed the First Minister's appeal to women in the following, less than glowing terms:

"Perhaps this feminine touch will help [to convince women to vote "yes"], as women appear to be put off by the muscular language in which male politicians clothe their arguments for independence. Female voters have never been too keen anyway on Alex Salmond, the brusque if charismatic leader of the ruling Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) and first minister of the Scottish government."

This is a familiar story, which many folk seem to find instinctively compelling. Yonks back, before the 2011 Holyrood election, the same thought speedily occurred to the Spectator's Alex Massie, who (admittedly only partially) accounted for the substantial gender gap then showing in support for the SNP in terms of female antipathies towards the Maximum Eck...

"To be fair, Salmond can do the retail side of politics. But again, I suspect there are some women put off by his Smart-Eckness and who find his chummyness mildly creepy."

I'm sure a score of pertinent anecdotes speed to mind, of unhappy meetings with the man, or disliked tics which have prompted rolled eyes and acid put downs from aunts, cousins, sisters and skeptical female friends who don't much care for how the First Minister comports himself.  But is there any evidence to back up the Economist's suggestion - presented as incontroverble - that Salmond is a liability when it comes to the distaff side of the Scottish electorate, that they're not "keen" on him? The interesting thing is, there isn't a terrifically strong body of opinion which suggests that women don't like Salmond. Indeed, if polls are to be believed, the opposite is actually the case and that the most take a generally favourable view. Scots polls include the personal ratings of our politicians on a more or less occasional basis, certainly less than Cameron, Clegg and Miliband's fortunes are tallied, so we have at best a semi-regular assessment of what respondents make of Salmond, and how this might be disaggregated in gendered terms.

Ipsos-MORI is the pollster of choice here. They reported the findings of their most recent Scottish Opinion Monitor poll in June, finding that a total of 53% of respondents declared themselves satisfied with Alex Salmond's performance as First Minister, compared to 40% who were dissatisfied, and an indecisive 7% who couldn't say whether he was up to snuff or not. Did positivity break down by gender, as the Economist would have us expect? Not exactly.  The pollster found:

As you can see, there's clearly an enthusiasm gap, with male satisfaction with Salmond running nine points higher than amongst women respondents, but that said, there's no substantial increase in female negativity about the First Minister either. Disappointment in his performance in office is separated by a much scrawnier 2% between the genders, with undecided women making up most of the difference.  This is just one poll, you might well say, and the trend's the thing. Never knowingly to be outdone in the department for political geekery, to satisfy my curiosity I've taken a wee trawl through Ipsos-MORI's archive of findingson Salmond's popularity, where the raw data could be broken down by gender.  This takes us back as far as November 2009.  After that, the data becomes more illusive and scrappy.

I've put together three charts, illustrating the pollster's findings, and how these have changed over time. The first is the combined chart, showing the percentages of men and women respectively who said they were satisfied, dissatisfied, or who didn't know what to make of Salmond's performance over the period.  Male responses are represented by the triangled lines, women's by the white-dotted circles. Satisfaction is rendered in blue, dissatisfaction in green, and don't knows in light orange.

In case that's difficult to handle, we can also pull the gendered data into two separate charts, showing how enthusiasm has gained and waned for him over time, amongst men and women respectively.

And the women:

Both forceps-shaped charts tell a similar story, with Salmond securing positive satisfied ratings from both genders in eight of nine polls going back to late 2009.  His positive ratings amongst both sexes have been on a shallow downward incline since the peak of August and December 2011, and negative ratings increasing over the same period. At the moment, he's being pinched by falling positive ratings, and increasing negative ones from men and women both. Neatly mirroring the independence polling that partly encouraged the coalition of Women for Independence to put themselves in the field, we see less enthusiasm for the First Minister from women than men across these polls.  Where dissatisfaction about his performance has grown, the findings from men and women have (for the main) tracked one another very closely (January's poll of this year being something of an exception).  In polling terms at least, there's little evidence here that women feel substantially more negative about Salmond than men, though the idea they're less keen on him is given some substance.

Cue a number of pertinent cavils. Firstly, it'd be wrong to conflate fondness for the man with the idea that the man is making a satisfactory fist of his duties in Bute House. I'm sure most of us can think of folk who are perfect bastards or contemptible toads who we'd still credit as admirable workers, their capacity and talents for graft not to be disputed, despite sustained misgivings we might nurse about their personalities, values, or fundamental character traits. This in mind, the polls aren't exactly fatal to the Economist's theory. Women may well not like the man, but applying their nosepegs, and discriminating between the alternatives, they're willing, grudgingly, to say that he's doing a satisfactory job in office. That theory certainly isn't inconsistent with this polling, but it does show that if this is what is going on - women aren't proving shy about setting aside those negative assessments, and reaching a positive view about the First Minister's performance anyway.