"Winning over female voters crucial to SNP ambitions...."

Hamlet, Hamlet, loved his mammy

Hamlet, Hamlet, acting bammy...

One of the perils of being suspected of being a calculating so-and-so is that the suspicious section of your audience has its eyes and ears always upon you, lending even your smallest gesture a sly, premeditated significance. Many folk have interpreted Alex Salmond's recent Desert Island Discs appearance and music selections in this way. Not, as the venerable format suggests, a chance for tight-buttoned public figures to be disclosing and personable, but another way for the strategising political creature to calculate what sort of "inner life" and species of relaxed candour they'd like listeners to imagine they have. Only a rather elementary liar would imagine only two faces are required, mask and phizog. The real past masters recognise that at least three personas are necessary, and there is no more effective way of hoodwinking the credulous than by giving them the impression they've "seen through" your front and have discovered, by simple operation of their own wit and clarity, some bashfully concealed real quality of your character. In most cases, when the vanity which  accompanies apparently clear-eyed perception vies with suspicion, the latter rarely triumphs. 

If you are of a doubt filled disposition, you might think that it was hardly coincidental that Salmond used his radio spot to harp on the string of the debts of affection and influence owed to his mammy,  rewarded with references to the importance of a female influence in his life. This is by no means to take cynicism too far and to imply that he was fibbing. Rather, we might see it as a significant example of sincerity and self interest happily coinciding.  Yesterday's Holyrood poll furnishes us with another, electorally extremely concerning example of the SNP's gender gap, which is by now well-kent phenomenon on this blog. In a Scotsman column published last August, former Salmond aide Jennifer Dempsie contended that "Winning over female voters crucial to SNP ambitions", continuing:

"... gender balance is taken seriously within the SNP leadership. Efforts have been made to soften the party's image. During the 2007 election a major push was made in education and health policy to attract the female vote. However if real gains are to be made in this department a concentrated campaign is needed and the adoption of a more women-friendly approach to campaigning."

If she is correct and the late polling even broadly captures the underlying quality of public opinion, we're in for a drubbing unless real progress is made and made swiftly.  The latest data shows the SNP some 18% behind Labour amongst female respondents in the constituency and 29% behind amongst those women who identify as "committed voters". On the regional list, we are lagging behind Labour to the tune of 15% amongst women, rising to a 24% gap amongst those women voters, committed to exercising their franchise. In the last Ipsos MORI poll which I covered in any detail, published at the end of last November, the SNP were lagging behind Labour in female support to the tune of 18% on the constituency ballot and a significantly smaller 3% on the list. An earlier YouGov poll from August, the "gap" between the SNP and Labour amounting to 6% in constituencies, while the party actually recorded a lead of 1% over Labour amongst women on the list. The data suggests that the gap is shifting and implies something of the complexity of the social phenomenon only partially pinned down by crude quantitative categories. It also suggests that the results from recent polling  diagnose the widest end of any gender gap. Few I think, would seriously suggest that the gap is merely phantasmal, a pollster's spectre. 

 

In a paper by James Mitchell, Robert Johns and Lynn Bennie, "Gendered Nationalism: Women and the SNP" (2009), they wrote:

"... there has been little research aimed at explaining this gender gap. One possible explanation lies in national identity, which as already indicated is a key mobiliser in support for the SNP. It might be that Scottish national identity has greater appeal for males, not least because of its associations with sport (football and rugby, for example). The evidence here contradicts that possibility. If anything, men’s identities are more British than are those of women, although the differences are small (and only marginally statistically significant). The SNP’s particular appeal to men – or problems in attracting support from women – must have some other basis."

The main focus of the rest of this piece, quite understandably, was on the significant quantity of data unearthed in the course of their ESRC funded project on the SNP party membership.  They need no lectures from me on how generalising from the party membership to the general voting population is problematic. Nevertheless, they tentatively suggest that there may be some relationship between differentially gendered attitude towards the constitution and support for the SNP. Entangled issues of (a) support for nationalism and (b) support for Nationalists. As we are often reminded, support for the SNP is oft-times greater than support for independence, encompassing a number of folk who may be undecided about, or actively hostile to, the prospect of Scottish independence. By focussing on independence by referendum, the party has actively fostered the notion that a vote for the SNP is not a vote for independence per se (at most it is a vote for a vote on independence). Independence being a "detachable issue", Unionists can vote SNP with consciences clear. Mitchell et. al and others hypothesise that women may not vote SNP because of their more conservative constitutional attitudes. For my own part, I'd rather focus the issue in a different way, and instead of rooting the problem of lower female support in women, focus on how the party needs to change its approach, whether substantially or in terms of communication.

Given the urgency of the issue and the necessity to think through these issues - now and in the longer term - I thought it might be helpful to bring together recent discussions of the issue across the blogs and the various other explanations and solutions people have adduced to the N(/n)ationalist problem. Inspired by Dempsie's piece, I set down my initial thoughts in a post on the SNP and its gender voting gap.

Spectator blogger Alex Massie rooted the problem more specifically in the Maximum Eck's personality, styling it Alex Salmond's women problem and suggesting that women may find his style alienating.

Analysis aided by the virtue of being a lassie herself, La Corbie offered her burdz eye view on The SNP's problem with wimmin, earlier writing about the Scottish parliamentary representation of women in Work, Work, Work.

Bella Caledonia hosted an interest range of authoresses who particularly focussed on the constitutional rather than the partisan issue of SNP strategy. Given the (albeit complex) connection between attitudes to the constitution and attitudes to the SNP, these articles contain much that is relevant and worthy of consideration. Caitlin O'Hara was Bella's first Independent Woman, while Lena the Hyena was their second.  Joan McAlpine echoed the title of her blog in Go Lassies Go. It wasn't the wild mountain thyme she was after, but some of the whys and wherefores on Scottish women's attitudes towards the prospect of an independent Scotland and more concretely, towards the SNP .

Scotland Deformed? asks Kirsten Stirling. Analysing the work of Alasdair Gray, she concludes:

"In Poor Things Gray takes a tradition of seeing Scotland as essentially divided and transforms its allegorical potential into something still monstrous yet potentially positive, reappropriating the celebratory approach to the Caledonian antisyzygy found in Smith and MacDiarmid. The deformed body of Bella Caledonia need not be read negatively. Gray highlights the discourses of monstrosity in the cultural and literary construction of Scotland and proposes an allegorical body in which different constructions of Scotland can co-exist. He opens the door to new narratives of Scotland in which both Scotland and women can be theorised without being critically deformed in the process."

Finally, I tried to approach the issue from the side of Scottish masculinities, and their implications for an analysis of Scottish women's feelings and attitudes, in Will you go laddie go?

Women, the SNP & its gender voting gap

I count myself among those who recoil somewhat from the familiar crudely-cut blocks of  popular American psephology - the woman's vote, the Hispanic vote, the black vote, college graduates, the blue-collar vote and so on and so on.  Despite our occasional tendency to ape (particularly political) Americana, our political discourse seems to have largely eschewed and resisted the discourse where the "public" or the "electorate" is imagined first and foremost as a conglomerate of homogeneous groups, conceived as boasting more or less unified interests. Admittedly in February, before Labour's defeat in the 2010 Westminster election,  Jim Murphy treated us to a pious homily, widely interpreted as an indelicate attempt to "play the religion card", better to win over "faith-based" or in the alternative "values" voters, whoever they are. At times, in the Scottish context, the concept of the West Coast "Catholic" and "Muslim" votes are invoked but I'd argue that neither are a strict mainstay of the political discourse. Their appearances are episodic, cited to explain a particular turmoil, scandal or political stratagem. Behind the scenery, however, in party focus groups and in internal polling, I'm sure that such concepts are appealed to and manipulated in the hope of gaining or maintaining high office. Interesting, then, to read Jennifer Dempsie (a former Mosca to the Maximum Eck) arguing in the last edition of the Scotland on Sunday, that "Winning over female voters crucial to SNP ambitions".  Dempsie contends that:

"Apart from devising a bargain basement manifesto, the greatest challenge the SNP faces is how to return to government with a greater share of the vote. I think this can only be done if the gender imbalance in the party's support - the lower number of female supporters to male - is tackled."

What is the evidence for this claim? Like the other Scots psephological categories mentioned, lurking in the political unconscious of the press - and occasionally finding deliberate expression - there is certainly the idea that women are generally less Nationalist and nationalist-inclined than the male electorate, attitudes albeit fluxuating with the times. We needn't be entirely impressionistic about this theory. Chapters in Gerry Hassan's (2009) edited volume on The Modern SNP: From Protest to Power address some of these questions directly. Fiona Mackay and Meryl Kennedy combined to write on "Women's Political Representation in the SNP: Gendered Paradoxes and Puzzles", while James Mitchell, Robert Johns and Lynn Bennie ask "Who are the SNP members?", drawing on evidence unearthed by their recent Economic and Social Research Council funded empirical research project into the socio-demography of SNP members. Table 6.1 (Hassan 2009, 69) outlined the membership figures.

In 2007/08, 31.8% of SNP members were women, 68.2% men.

It is worth noting that having a male-majority membership doesn't place the SNP as a wildly aberrant outlier in comparison to other Scots political parties. The gap, however, is undeniably significant. The chapter  also emphasises a number of other interesting points extracted from the material furnished by their respondents' , including the fact that less than 8% of SNP members are under 35 years of age, 35% have a degree, 6.7% of members were born in England, while 51% had lived furth of Scotland for six months or more, just under half of them in England. But back to my primary theme. Mackay & Kennedy's piece includes a gendered analysis of voting in the 2007 Holyrood poll (2009, 50 - 1). Here, the gender gap in SNP support is plain.

On the constituency ballot, 41% of the male electorate supported the SNP, compared to only 32% of women voters.  On the list, 35% of men voted for the SNP, but only 27% of women.

It is all very well to present this quantitative representation of opinion. The whys and the wherefores of ordinary life, with its uncertainties, ambivalences, unconscious motivations - these cannot be neatly or straightforwardly captured to explain why there is a 9 and 8 point divergence in SNP support or what the party should be doing to appeal more to women voters. Dempsie's piece is largely polemical, buttressed here and there with bits and pieces of evidence.

... increasing female representation to attract female support is just part of the solution. Adopting a more positive and less rough-and-tumble approach to political communications is absolutely critical. All too often, not just women, but men also, are turned off by the hard words of the political debate.

She doesn't mention another relevant piece of recent data, which might suggest how the SNP's "women strategy", such as it is, is faring. Regular readers might recall in May of this year, I drew your attention to some sections of the 2009 Scottish Social Attitudes Survey , touching on the electorate's faith in the Scottish Government to make fair decisions. Here is the relevant graph and an explanation of the figures.

On gendered trust in the Scottish Government, the survey rather surprisingly discovered that:

"Women were significantly less positive than men about a number of aspects of government in Scotland in 2009. For example, just 29% of women, compared with 43% of men, trusted the Scottish Government 'a great deal' or 'quite a lot' to make fair decisions."

In 2007, 50% of men and 44% of women expressed 'a great deal' or 'quite a lot' of trust in the Scottish Executive to make fair decisions - a gap of just 6 points. But by 2009, while the proportion of men who trusted the Scottish Government on this measure had fallen to 43%, the proportion of women who said the same fell even more sharply, to 29%. In fact, it appears that while the views of men remained more positive in 2009, trust among women had fallen back to close to 2006 levels (33% of men, 30% of women). If indeed Dempsie is correct and the SNP's fortunes in 2011 depend on convincing Scottish women of our virtues and faithfulness, the responses to the Social Attitude Survey may counsel a serious change of tack and a far more concerted effort on our part.