What is it about?
This article examines the reasons why such inclusion would be challenging and then considers what the Scottish diaspora think about Scottish independence and voting rights, by considering individual responses to a survey of members of the Scottish diaspora.
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Why is it important?
Our findings reveal that the diaspora retains a strong sense of Scottish identity and an awareness of political events. Secondly, while the returned diaspora mostly believed that Scots remaining overseas should not have voting rights, a majority of the current diaspora unsurprisingly resented being excluded from voting. That said, there remains much disagreement over how eligibility for voting could be defined.
Perspectives
We conclude that the Scottish government is correct to define the franchise by residence rather than by bloodline—by demos rather than by ethnos. But, interestingly, one of the arguments against giving the vote to Scots in the wider UK in 2014 was a belief that they were likely to vote for the Union, thereby skewing the vote against independence. This would have rendered the result more challengeable. In fact, partly because of Brexit and partly because of the poor standing of the current Conservative government in Westminster, there currently appears to be a majority in favour of independence within the diaspora. So, the idea that the diaspora is predominantly unionist seems no longer to be accurate.
Professor Murray Stewart Leith
University of the West of Scotland
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: A Second Scottish Independence Referendum: Should the Diaspora get a Vote?, The Political Quarterly, February 2023, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/1467-923x.13235.
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