Michael Keating

University of Aberdeen
Professor of Politics, University of Aberdeen and Director of ESRC Centre on Constitutional Change

Biography

Michael Keating is Professor of Politics at the University of Aberdeen, part-time Professor at the University of Edinburgh and Director of the ESRC Centre on Constitutional Change. He has a BA from the University of Oxford and in 1975 was the first PhD graduate from what is now Glasgow Caledonian University. He has taught in several universities including Strathclyde, Western Ontario and the European University Institute, as well as universities in Spain and France.  He is a Fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Academy of Social Sciences. Michael Keating is the author or editor of over thirty books on Scottish politics, European politics, nationalism and regionalism. Among his recent books are The Independence of Scotland (Oxford University Press, 2009) and Rescaling the European State (Oxford University Press, 2013).

Expertise

Constitution

Posts by this author

Brexit Jack

Brexit, Borders and Backstops

Disagreements about the border between Northern Ireland and Ireland are about more than practical considerations of where customs checks should be performed, says Michael Keating.
Hunting the Snark

The Brexit Agreement. Hunting the Snark.

What has been presented as an endgame is really just the beginning of the process and what is being described as the 'transition' or 'implementation' period, says Michael Keating, is really the time in which the real negotiation of what Brexit means will take place.
Ragged Union Jack

Building the Union Again. The New Act of Union

The recent introduction of the bill for an Act of Union into the House of Lords is a welcome addition to the debate on the future of Unionism that has been rumbling on since the devolution legislation of 1999 but, says Michael Keating, it contains several problems that will be familiar to those who have followed this debate.
Basque Coat of Arms

The Basque Statute of Autonomy

Proposed revisions to the Basque Statute of Autonomy have revealed underlying tensions but the fault lines are not where an outside observer might assume they would be. They are fundamental and political and, explains Michael Keating, unlikely to be resolved by technocratic debate.
Hill Farming

The Agriculture Bill and the Implications for Devolution

Buried within the UK Agriculture Bill, a clause allowing UK ministers to determine which of three WTO 'boxes' state aid for farmers should goes into could prove difficult for the devolved administrations.
Norway and EU

Is the UK ready for a Norway-style deal?

The White Paper published this week talks about the UK Government making ‘sovereign decisions’ to adopt European rules but, as we know from the experience of Norway and Switzerland, this can be an illusory sovereignty when the costs of deviating from the rules is exclusion from the single market or European programmes. CCC Director Professor Michael Keating looks at whether the UK is ready for this kind of deal.