The debate between the Scottish Executive, backed by the parliament in Holyrood, and the United Kingdom Cabinet, backed by the Westminster parliament, over the date and terms of the Scottish referendum on Independence broke out into the open last week. As the referendum will not be for at least a year, and this is an issue of major constitutional importance for the whole of the United Kingdom, the debate will probably be fierce, as there are a lot of issues at stake.
We set up a search for Scotland AND {Referendum OR Independence}, for the period 13th February to 19th February, which returned 4,323 results. This was classified into the following categories:
- pro – Pro independence;
- undec – undecided;
- anti – anti independence or pro-Union;
- news – news reports.
This produced the following breakdown:
| Mech | pro | undec | anti | news | Total |
| MicroBlog | 65 | 564 | 388 | 1027 | 2044 |
| Blog | 0 | 1 | 7 | 29 | 37 |
| News | 0 | 7 | 51 | 160 | 218 |
| WWW | 3 | 74 | 355 | 750 | 1182 |
| Media | 1 | 5 | 4 | 65 | 75 |
| Total | 69 | 651 | 805 | 2031 | 3556 |
| Percent | 4.52 | 42.69 | 52.79 |
There are a number of things to note here:
- The classification, shows fewer results than found by the search. This is because a lot of the posts were ambiguous, and thus none of the categories had more than 50% probability of being correct.
- The pro-independence category had a very small share of the posts; this could be an artefact of the classification, or due to the large amount of coverage given to David Cameron’s pro-Union speech in Edinburgh on Tuesday.
- News reports of the speech and the debate made up 57.1% of the total, reflecting the media interest in Scotland, the United Kingdom, and around the world in the debate.
We will keep this search running until the referendum, and report on it on a weekly basis; we hope that this will enable us to refine the classifications and provide a sound measure of the debate as it moves forward.