Scotland’s twin referendums: revealing regional divides behind national votes

Scotland’s 2014 independence referendum and the 2016 EU referendum are often interpreted as politically aligned at the national scale, reinforcing a simplified narrative of a strongly pro-independence, pro-EU portion of the Scottish electorate. This regional graphic challenges that view using a bivariate, population-weighted cartogram that jointly visualises both votes across parliamentary constituencies. By correcting for uneven population distributions and revealing sub-regional variation, the graphic exposes multi-scalar political cleavages within cities, regions and economic hinterlands. The visualisation demonstrates how national aggregates obscure regional political heterogeneity and highlights the value of spatially explicit graphics for interpreting constitutional and electoral change.