Scottish Political Culture Research Articles

Direct and Indirect Prejudice in Scotland

This paper estimates levels of prejudice in Scotland with data from the 2021 Scottish Election Survey. It examines both direct and indirect indicators of prejudice to discover that somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of respondents indicate prejudicial feelings towards immigrants. Comparisons with results from other surveys in the UK and abroad suggest lower rates of prejudice in Scotland, and declining rates of prejudice over time. Empirical comparisons reveal direct and indirect prejudice to be closely related in Scotland, and regression analysis discovers common determinants of directly and indirectly prejudicial feelings. Political positions, such as ideological conservativism, identifying as a Remainer in the Brexit debate, and support for Scottish independence are important determinants across indicators of prejudice, and the strength of these political indicators demonstrates how Scottish political culture has been linked to minority politics in such a way as to re-draw social boundaries around expressions of prejudice.

Popular or Parliamentary Sovereignty? National Opinion and the Declaration of Arbroath on the Eve of Union

Hoping to stop the ratification of a treaty of incorporating union with England, late in 1706 the parish minister Robert Wylie quoted the Declaration of Arbroath in a draft manifesto for an armed uprising. Rather than seeing Wylie’s manifesto as part of a perceived tradition of popular sovereignty rooted in the Declaration of Arbroath, this paper asks what his quotation reveals about this early modern moment. It confirms a growing awareness of the Declaration of Arbroath in Scottish political culture and its usefulness as patriotic rhetoric for Whigs and Jacobites alike, aided by the publication of English translations from 1689. It shows how Wylie used the Declaration to suggest that the pro-treaty majority in the Scottish parliament was a traitorous faction out of step with the mind of a nation bound by its covenant oaths and how this attack on the legitimacy of the estates went against more than a century of presbyterian efforts to bolster the authority of the parliament as a counter to Stewart power. Wylie’s document thus confirms the rising relevance of public opinion in this era and its construction in terms of conscience and covenants; and underlines a key struggle in the making of the union between extra-parliamentary opinion, highlighted in petitions and weaponised through calls for recesses and special assemblies, and the stature of the Scottish parliament as the embodiment of the political nation.

Allan Pinkerton: Informed Scot or Scottish Informer?

Allan Pinkerton (1819–1884) has a conflicted legacy. To some, the founder of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency (PNDA) pioneered law and order on the American frontier, upheld principles of racial equality, and prepared the way for better public police forces including the FBI. To others, Pinkerton betrayed the values of his Scottish youth: he had been a champion of militant workers in Scotland, and participated in revolutionary uprisings in Wales and England, yet was instrumental in crushing organised labour in the United States. In truth, Pinkerton never played a part in Wales’ Newport uprising, and took with him, when he crossed the Atlantic in 1842, knowhow about repression that he had acquired on his native soil. He may have learned about informers because he was one of their victims, or he may have promoted labour espionage in Pennsylvania in the 1870s because he had been himself an informer before he emigrated. The Scottish authorities’ deliberate abstinence from record-keeping and the serial, defensive destruction of PNDA records mean it is impossible to prove or disprove the informer hypothesis, but the role of the informer in Scottish political culture does help to explain Pinkerton’s behaviour and apparent hypocrisy.

‘A distant and whiggish country’: the Conservative party and Scottish elections, 1832–47*

Abstract This article examines the role of the Scottish Conservative party in shaping the underlying culture of Scottish politics in the 1830s and 1840s, utilizing numerous collections of private papers, newspapers, memoirs and legal texts. It focuses on the party’s experiences of electioneering rituals, and its innovative electoral registration activities. It then examines the effects of its creation of illegitimate ‘fictitious’ votes, and of its diverse methods for influencing electors. In doing so, it puts ‘party’ at the heart of a notably distinctive and fast-evolving Scottish political culture, and challenges assumptions that this culture was overwhelmingly whiggish in character and inspiration.

‘Party Principles’ in Scottish Political Culture: Roxburghshire, 1832–1847

In this article it is argued that everyday processes and rituals entrenched political identities in post-reform political culture. The intensification of formal party allegiances—that is, deep and enduring loyalties towards factions within the established partisan structure—was not solely a result of ideology. Allegiances were also strengthened by the local activities of parties and by the infrastructure enhanced (and to an extent imported) by the Scottish Reform Act. These two factors reinforced each other, encouraging a vibrant, and at times violent, set of election rituals. From particular analysis of the constituency of Roxburghshire, it is clear that local party organisations were more autonomous, flexible and deeply rooted in broader society than might be assumed. Moreover, the rituals and processes of electioneering were very closely linked to formal parties and party allegiance. Indeed, the phenomenon of electoral violence, thus far assumed to be practically non-existent in Scotland, was closely related to election rituals and parties. This all suggests that formal partisan identities were more developed, and at an earlier stage, in Scotland than elsewhere in the UK. These identities would go on to play a notable role in shaping the development of mid- and late Victorian Scottish society.

Rethinking the Scottish Revolution: Covenanted Scotland, 1637–1651, by Laura A. M. Stewart

This book provides a new framework for understanding the complex period of political and religious disruption in Scotland from 1637 to 1651. For decades, scholars have relied on David Stevenson’s high-political account of the period. I would not suggest that you discard your copies of Stevenson’s The Scottish Revolution 1637–44 (1973) and Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Scotland, 1644–1651 (1977) just yet, but Laura Stewart has provided a convincing thematic reappraisal of the period updated to sit comfortably within current historiography. Stewart’s analysis is refreshingly cosmopolitan. She engages meaningfully with historiographies from English, Irish and Continental European contexts. Scholars of these other regions’ histories too often neglect Scottish history because it can appear parochial. But, as Stewart’s volume affirms time and again, they would do well to attend to her conclusions. The book is divided into two sections—‘The Making of Covenanted Scotland’ and ‘Covenanted Scotland’—comprising three chapters each, alongside a lengthy introduction and conclusion. Stewart’s analysis develops from an understanding of politics as a ‘dynamic and inherently unstable process in which different social groups negotiate the inequalities of power relations’. Through the Prayer Book crisis, new groups, hitherto silent, were drawn into dialogue about power and authority, and those elites in power were forced to justify a ‘more expansive, and coercive state’. The Covenanted state may have failed by 1651, but not before its elite had permanently transformed early modern Scottish political culture. There is clearly a lot of material to cover and, at points, the balance between exposition and argument is off kilter—too many words are spent rehearsing historiography or too few words used to explain an important historical event.

The Paradox of Scottish Political Culture

Scottish political culture adhered to a form of universalism from the Enlightenment until quite recently. In that sense, it denied its own distinctiveness, asserting as part of the very definition of the nation that national distinctiveness ought to be subsumed into liberal principles that are applicable everywhere and at all times. These universalistic ideas changed as society changed, and became more truly universal with the advent of universal democracy and the end of Empire. They are one reason why Scotland remained attached to the British union, and indeed Britain itself came to embody the concept of universalism from the middle of the eighteenth century until well after the middle of the twentieth. Recent Scottish political assertion has, however, moved away from this self-confident universalism. The article discusses the implications for the current debate about Scottish independence of both the longer history and the recent change.

The Scottish Nation: Identity and History (Essays in Honour of William Ferguson)

This Festschrift for William Ferguson, who taught Scottish History in the University of Edinburgh until 1989, contains nine essays on Scottish subjects ranging from the early modern to the recent past. This diversity reflects Ferguson's scholarly interests, but, like his published work, the book has a particular focus on politics and society in the long eighteenth century. The strongest essays in the collection are wide-ranging and should stimulate further research. This is particularly true of Tristram Clarke's contribution, which assesses the genre of collective biography in Scotland, from the efforts of seventeenth-century antiquarians to the Oxford DNB (2004) and the Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women (2006). Clarke opens up a new subject in Scottish historical studies, which will be of interest to scholars of national culture elsewhere in Europe. Also of broad interest, Edward Cowan's chapter is a cultural history of the ‘Scottish self-myth of democratic patriotism and honest, steadfast commonalty’ (p. 3). Cowan concentrates particularly on the sixteenth-century figure of Jock Uppaland (actually of English origin), but draws parallels with the interests of Robert Burns and the perennially important William Wallace. Alexander Murdoch has contributed a stimulating interpretation of the legacy of the 1689 revolution, placing the revolution, more than the union of 1707, at the heart of eighteenth-century Scottish political culture. Particularly noteworthy are Murdoch's thoughts on the evolution of whiggish unionism, and the claims of successive politicians (in 1707, after the ’45 and in 1832) to ‘complete’ the work of the revolution. Also important is the late Iain Maciver's survey of the politics of the Church of Scotland before the Disruption. This chapter usefully complements I.D.L. Clark's seminal essay of 1970 on the Moderates between 1752 and 1805, and should be added to undergraduate reading lists on early nineteenth-century religion.

Integration, Assimilation and Social Inclusion: Questions of Faith

Scotland is unique in having an established church that does not run its own schools; it is also unique in having a minority denominational sector that is dominated by one church alone. National debate on religion is locked in Scotland because closed minds prevail. ‘There is no alternative.’ The debate is conducted oblivious to faith arrangements in other European countries, and regardless of the need to reach some new accommodation. The Census of 2001 reveals Scotland's high rate of ‘secularisation’, the variable balance between denominations in different parts of the country, and the presence in all cities of other religions. Arrangements decided a century ago just do not fit the facts of faith today. Scotland cannot continue to seek assimilation, and sustain outdated arrangements; some new forms of integration are required. Inexorably the debate is being reopened because new legislation, based on the principles of human rights, is penetrating the fabric of Scottish political culture.

“Treachery in the Remotest Territories of Scotland:” Northern Resistance to the Canmore Dynasty, 1130-1230

This paper explores a hitherto largely neglected facet of medieval Scottish history: resistance to the kings of the so-called Canmore dynasty (Malcolm III and his descendants) from the northern regions of Moray and Ross between the late eleventh and early thirteenth centuries. It explores incidents of insurrection between about 1100 and 1230, analyzing leadership, timing, military aspects, and the geographical context. Far from representing merely haphazard raids of little or no consequence or threat, it is suggested that these insurrections constituted carefully timed and orchestrated predatory strikes at the Scottish kings in their weakest moments, thus deepening our understanding of Scottish political culture in a crucial era.

The History of British Political Thought: The Creation of a Center

A Center for the History of British Political Thought has been established at the Folger Shakespeare Library and will be conducting a series of seminars aimed at covering what is conventionally demarcated as the early modern period: the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. No comprehensive history of British political thought in this period has to our knowledge been written, and it is an open question of what it should consist and what its organizing themes should be. The purpose of this article is to present a speculative inquiry into its conceptual scope.The scope and meaning of the word “British” is fundamental to our inquiry. The core component is surely England, and both the weight of literature and the tradition of study render it inescapable that English will be the language and the dominant culture with which most of our program will be concerned. It will be necessary nonetheless to recognize the autonomy of Scottish political culture and its literature and of the cultures formed by English hegemony, whose political thought must be studied both before and after their assertions of independence.We must further examine what is to be meant by the term “political thought.” A considerable methodological literature has marked the rise in the last two decades of what has been called the “new history” of political thought. This inquiry has become less an adjunct to the practice of political theory and more a history of the terms of discourse in which debate about politics has been carried on.