In the latest post in our series examining Twitter and the independence referendum debate, we turn from analysing who is participating to exploring what is being discussed. Our first trawl of the text of tweets using #indyref hashtag in the period January 2014 – April 2014 identifies those issues most frequently discussed. The findings for…
Today we provide another snapshot of one week’s coverage (20-26th January 2014 – c.27,000 connections[1]) of the debate about the Scottish Independence Referendum on the social media platform, Twitter. The patterns are broadly similar to those we reported in January (based on one week’s traffic in December 2013). Typically those in support of a yes…
In the first of a series of visualisation snapshots, using data from twitter, we constructed a network graph showing the connections between users and hashtags for tweets about the independence referendum. This snapshot covers one week (13th-19th December) including c.13,000 connections[1]. One observation based on the data is that the Yes campaign has a wider…
Scotland’s economy will benefit from independence over the uncertainty that would face the country within the UK, Finance Secretary John Swinney told a large audience at the inaugural annual Policy Scotland lecture on 10th December 2013. Speaking at Glasgow University Mr Swinney said that Scotland’s economic performance has improved significantly since 1999 with Scotland reaching similar…
By Professor Ronald MacDonald, Research Professor of Macroeconomics and International Finance, Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow In this paper, Professor Ronald MacDonald takes on the role of a ‘virtual consultant’ to a potentially independent Scotland. What should the exchange rate regime of an independent Scotland look like? MacDonald argues that the current proposal…
By Dr Phillips O’Brien, Director of the Scottish Centre for War Studies at the University of Glasgow. Defence is one of the most contentious issues in the independence debate, with the fate of the naval bases at Faslane and Coulport – and the future of the British nuclear weapons sited there – dominating discussion so…