The 2014 scottish independence referendum in text, image and thought

Abstract: In 2014, a referendum was held in Scotland in order to decide the country’s constitutional future. The referendum was the climax of years of campaigning that gave rise to a rich body of political discourse. This compilation thesis attempts to show how an independent Scotland was discursively constructed, and how these constructions impacted on Scottish identity. The thesis consists of four original research papers which employ a number of complementary approaches in order to analyse a rich and diverse data set.The first article examines how the Scottish government looked at small European states in order to construct a vision of a future independent Scotland. This was achieved by discursively constructing small states as economically successful and democratically progressive and then by emphasizing Scotland’s role as a small country.The second article analyses the many new metaphorical personifications of Scotland, notably as a woman, that appeared during the campaign. The article finds that traditional, gendered metaphors were largely reworked in order to function in a modern political context.The third article maps the central topics and the ideological morphology of discourses on Scottish independence produced by the Scottish National Party and the intellectual and artistic movement National Collective. Unlike previous research, the results of the analysis suggest that these organizations as complementary but labels the former politically nationalist and the latter culturally nationalist.The fourth article analyses image tweets published by the official Yes and No campaigns in order to ascertain how the two campaigns legitimated their own standpoints and how they delegitimated their opponents online. The analysis finds that the Yes campaign balanced between promoting its own visions whilst criticizing their opponents, in contrast to the No campaign which almost entirely focused on delegitimating its opponents, thus failing to offer alternative visions.Collectively, the thesis paints a picture of a diverse independence movement with different aims and different rationales for advocating independence. Besides making a contribution to the literature on nationalism in general and Scottish nationalism in particular, the thesis further integrates the fields of political theory and discourse studies.