Scotland: Wealthy counties said NO to independence

Roughly a week has passed since Scotland decided about leaving or staying in the UK via referendum. As written in my last post the polls were far from being clear and it was a head-to-head race until the very end: Scotland decided not to leave the UK and the rest is history. But now, as dust has settled a bit and UK officials are relieved by the outcome of the referendum, it’s time to take a closer look on the results.

First, we can take a look on a map of Scotland with election results ordered by ‘council area’ or, simply put, counties.

The more red you see the more people said NO to Scottish independence, but be aware that the coloring does not cover the full 100 % of the scale. That means, although an overwhelming majority of counties voted against independence, it was still very close in most counties itself. Notably, only a handful of counties reached more than 50 % YES votes and these were the urban areas of Glasgow and Dundee.

Nothing special so far, but we can still dive deeper into the election results by taking social data into consideration. Using the official report on income and poverty, we can correlate the votes for independence (YES) with these measures. In the following figure, every dot represents one county. There is no clear correlation with the first two variables (Population and Turnout) but indeed for the next two: Counties with higher income and lower poverty rate voted against independence and for staying in the UK!