With the advent of the Independence Referendum, unprecedented levels of public engagement in Scotland saw a turnout of 84.6% at the polls. During the campaign period, social media platforms played a prominent role in facilitating discussion, highlighting their increasingly important role in (re)producing opinions, views and behaviours. While the referendum itself did not focus on individual candidates, a number of key political figures were women, including Johann Lamont, former leader of Scottish Labour, Ruth Davidson of the Scottish Conservatives and perhaps most prominently, Nicola Sturgeon, Leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP) and First Minister of Scotland. Traditionally, women in politics have tended to be trivialised and sexualised in the media, and current literature still points to evidence of female politicians being gendered in certain ways. Some studies have suggested social media platforms form a more inclusive democratic space, contributing to balanced discursive realm for female politicians than in the mass media. Others, however, have suggested that female politicians are still gendered in similar ways on these platforms, with some even being subject to extreme behaviour in the form of aggressive and sexualised abuse. This paper will therefore perform an analysis on the representations of female politicians in Scotland on social media, focusing on Twitter in particular. Looking at a body of sample tweets during the Independence Referendum, the objective of this study is to look at the role gender plays within their representations in social media in an emergent political setting in which women leaders predominate.
