Abstract
The 2014 Scottish independence referendum transformed the Scottish National Party. Its membership roughly quadrupled, and eight months later it won 56 of Scotland's 59 Westminster seats. I ask what happened to the SNP on Facebook after the referendum, comparing it with the UK-wide parties and with Plaid Cymru, the other main nationalist party in Great Britain. The data are 195,268 public posts from 82 pages tracked by CrowdTangle between 2010 and October 2020: the party pages of seven parties, the pages of the SNP and Plaid Cymru leaders, 46 pages of SNP MPs elected in 2015 and one SNP MSP, and 24 pages of Welsh MPs. CrowdTangle's coverage of the large parties' pages before 2014 is too thin to fix a pre-referendum baseline, so I compare engagement per post from 2014. From late 2014 to mid-2016 the typical SNP post drew about three-quarters of the engagement of a typical Labour or Conservative post; from mid-2016 to 2018 about half, as the SNP's own engagement fell; and 0.8 in 2019 and 1.35 in 2020. Per follower, SNP posts drew more than the large parties' throughout. From 2015 to 2019 the pages of SNP MPs drew 26% to 35% of all engagement with SNP pages, concentrated in a few MPs, and in 2020 Nicola Sturgeon's page drew 47%. Per follower, SNP MPs' pages drew no more than Welsh MPs'. Plaid Cymru's engagement was concentrated in the pages of its leader and former leader. How the SNP's Facebook lead over Plaid compares with its vote advantage depends on which pages are compared, ranging from below to well above the ratio of their Westminster votes. Independence almost disappeared from the SNP's page after 2014, falling from about 30% of posts to 3% to 5%, before returning to 17% in 2019; posts that mentioned it drew about 40% more engagement than other posts in every period. The referendum did not leave the SNP with a lasting engagement lead over the large UK parties, but it left a larger and more dispersed presence whose fortunes moved with the constitutional question and, in 2020, with the First Minister's role in the pandemic.Files: the preprint (PDF); quarterly median interactions per post on UK party pages and quarterly post counts, 2012 to 2020; yearly interaction totals for groups of SNP and Plaid Cymru pages (party page, leaders, MPs), 2010 to 2020; and page-level summaries (posts, interactions, medians, followers) for the SNP and Welsh MPs' pages used in the comparison, 2016 to 2019. No post-level data are included.Provenance and AI use. The data were exported from CrowdTangle in October 2020 for my doctoral research. This paper builds on my doctoral thesis (Hotham 2021, University of Bath). The analysis and writing were completed in 2026. The analysis code and drafts of the text were prepared with the assistance of an AI system (Claude, by Anthropic), which was also used to review drafts. I checked the analysis and the text and take responsibility for both. Version 2 added this statement to the paper, and version 3 changes only the date on the title page; the findings are unchanged.
Cite
Hotham, T. (2026). After the Referendum: The SNP, Plaid Cymru and Facebook, 2014 to 2020. Preprint, Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23301374