Let's hear it for the Don't Knows

Download the article as a PDF It’s an old joke – I used to be indecisive but now I’m not so sure. And in the biggest constitutional decision most people in Scotland will be asked to participate in, a little uncertainty is to be expected. Analysis of survey results tends to pay little attention to uncertainty. We look at party support among people who are certain to vote. We look at people’s intention to vote ‘Yes’ or ‘No’, hardly noticing the people who have yet to make up their mind. Maybe it’s because there are so few of them and it seems like opinions have hardened. But more than a year away from the referendum perhaps we should be surprised and a little disappointed that there’s not more uncertainty. At least people who are uncertain might ask questions and debate to learn and form an opinion rather than just to be louder than the other side. Of course conviction has its place and if you were looking for people certain about supporting independence you might think that SNP supporters would be the place to start. You perhaps wouldn’t think that of all the people saying that they were unsure about whether or not Scotland should be an independent country, more than half would be SNP supporters. An SNP supporter undecided about independence? Surely, that’s a bit like a Green being unsure about global warming (or a bear wondering … well, what else can bears wonder about?). But that’s what seems to be the case. Our latest poll, carried out for The Times between 29 April and 5 May, found that 10% of respondents who said they were certain to vote in the referendum were undecided about whether they would vote ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. This pattern has been consistent in each of the previous four waves of the Scottish Public Opinion Monitor (SPOM) – our quarterly omnibus of Scottish opinion. But when the data were published, one slide showing referendum voting intentions by party support suggested something else. In line with the tendency to only show those with clear opinions, the chart only showed ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ support. You had to calculate that among SNP supporters 14% were undecided, compared with 8% of Labour supporters. In comparison, Conservative and Lib Dem supporters seemed to be solidly following the party’s position against independence – 95% and 94% respectively say they will vote ‘No’ – with only 2% of each undecided. So who is undecided? There aren’t many of them in a single wave of SPOM so we’ve combined the five most recent waves to give a big enough sample for some analysis. In terms of social and demographic characteristics, the undecided are almost indistinguishable from the rest of the population. The key thing that stands out, and this has been noted by many analysts already, is that women less likely to say they would vote Yes. Across the combined sample from five waves of SPOM – a total sample of 3,700 adults who said they were certain to vote in the referendum – the Yes campaign would get the support of 43% of men but only 27% of women. But this does not translate directly into opposition to independence. There seems to be a clear link to party support at least to the extent that apart from SNP supporters, there is little variation within party blocs. Looking at Labour supporters we see that 12% of men and 10% of women say they would vote Yes. Also that 12% of Labour-supporting women are undecided compared with 8% of Labour men. Not much difference. It seems that Labour men are just a little more set in their position than women. But there is a much greater gap between men and women who support the SNP. Over three-quarters (77%) of SNP-supporting men say they would vote Yes in a referendum but only 65% of women who would support the SNP in elections to the Scottish Parliament are likely to support its defining policy in the referendum – a gap of 12 percentage points. Among female SNP supporters, 19% say they would vote No (12% of men) and 17% are undecided (12% of men). How you might interpret this depends on your viewpoint. There is the tribal line: what hope is there of a Yes vote if the Yes campaign can’t even win the support of many people who should be on ‘their side’. The flip side is that the job of convincing the undecided just got a lot easier – they are halfway there already. It’s a relatively small step from supporting the SNP for the Scottish Parliament to voting Yes in the referendum. But we’ll leave that to the factions. Soberly, it suggests two things. First, that while the SNP seems to have been successful in attracting support for its policies in the Scottish Parliament – the freeze on Council Tax, free bus passes, tuition fees and prescriptions – and translating that into voting intentions for Scottish Parliamentary elections, this hasn’t yet translated into solid support for its core policy of independence, particularly among its female supporters where 36% say they would vote No or are undecided. Second, and more generally, across all the parties, 30% of adults who support parties whose official position is to support independence say they will vote No or are undecided. Among supporters of parties whose official position is to vote No, 20% say they will vote Yes or are undecided.

So both the Yes and No campaigns need to be wary of over-simplifying the parties as unified blocs of opinion. Labour may be formally in the No campaign but 1 in 9 of its supporters intends to vote Yes. Similarly, the SNP may be the party most closely associated with the call for a Yes vote but about 1 in 6 of its supporters plan to vote No. Instead of trying to convince the “opposition”, each would do well to look closer to home and try to understand what it is about their policy or their contribution to the debate that makes the party’s own supporters want to vote with the other side.

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