‘CAN I give you a leaflet?” A decade ago, this was a question many of us were asked on an almost daily basis. This was the period when the Yes campaign seemed to be everywhere all at once – in city centres, town and village squares, in workplaces, in community centres.

The epicentre of Scotland’s political gravity had temporarily shifted. Bars, restaurants, taxis, buses and trains were transformed into debating chambers on Scotland’s constitutional destiny.

There are different lenses through which these events are now perceived – those who view it as an era of political awakening and those who regard it as a period of division.

For the Scottish National Party, this was unambiguously a critical moment in its history. An orthodox account of post-referendum Scotland will tell you that the SNP benefited tremendously from the energy of the 2014 campaign and that the election victories that followed in the subsequent years are evidence of the dynamism that the aftermath of that campaign brought.

READ MORE: John Swinney says it’s ‘time for SNP to step up’ in conference speech

Of course, up to a point, this is true. Election results tell us so. But this is only a partial reading of that time. Because there is another side to this story, another narrative that helps explain why the case for independence lies almost like a long-forgotten white paper gathering dust on a shelf.

That is that the SNP have never really recovered from the referendum campaign. Not long before it swung into action, many SNP activists of that period will tell you of branch meetings where a dozen or so members in attendance was a solid turnout and having enough members in attendance to make decisions was a frequent concern. Many of these same activists will paint a very different picture of the period after the referendum – branch meetings where hundreds of new members arrived and channelled their disappointment at the outcome into party membership, many for the first time in their lives.

Arguably, no party machine can absorb the energy of a movement completely or effectively. The SNP are no different. Re-routing the enthusiasm of a unique (and often frenetic) political moment in 2014 to the more conventional, hierarchical and procedural reality of electoral politics could prove a messy business – a little like trying to conduct an unruly orchestra one day and directing a harmonious choir the next.

Tightly disciplined parliamentary cohorts at Holyrood and Westminster mixed with electoral success indicated that the SNP seemed to be managing this quite skilfully. However, the more recent fortunes of the party have helped to reveal something different.

Running parallel with the rise of the SNP as an election-winning machine was an unresolved tension about what took place in 2014.

In a study of the SNP by the University of Stirling and Glasgow Caledonian University, we identified two consequences (among others) of this tension: firstly, the lack of in-depth analysis on what went wrong during the Yes campaign and what lessons were learned; secondly, the way in which the campaign for independence seems demobilised and the prospect of a second referendum further away than ever.

These consequences may have their roots in the electoral success of the SNP post-2014 and efforts made to manage the tensions of being a party within a wider movement.

Although the party had been in government prior to the political moment of 2014, the goal of a (successful) referendum helped maintain the focus of elected members and activists.

Post-2014, the SNP – with new parliamentarians and an army of new staff and activists – directed their energy towards the serious politics of government at Holyrood and opposition at Westminster.

In doing so, the focus of those involved could often be directed towards implementing or mitigating the consequences of decisions made elsewhere.

Those who perhaps viewed themselves, even briefly, as part of a movement for political change were now in almost permanent election mode, vying with colleagues for ministerial positions at Holyrood and front bench positions at Westminster, all while representing very different constituencies.

This was a role many of them embraced. If the movement politics of 2014 was about shattering the consensus, then SNP politics post-2014 was about building a consensus that the SNP governed as a ‘“national” party. As the public face of the SNP, defending the record of the Scottish Government was (and continues to be) a crucial part of the job.

As such, opportunities for critical self-reflection about the party and the case for independence have become even scarcer. That includes an analysis of the failure of 2014 and the lessons to be learned from it, but also its success in convincing many people that an alternative to Westminster was a real possibility.

It may be an unrealistic (or even an unfair) expectation to ask the same people who have been engaged in parliamentary endeavours for almost a decade or more to now construct a new political imaginary that persuades the Scottish electorate of the case for independence.

READ MORE: Plaid Cymru send message to Yes supporters at SNP conference

For this reason, we are left considering the question: are the SNP now a “post-political” party? In other words, is it a party that is simply now involved in the technocratic day-to-day work of governance of specific areas of devolved policymaking? Or is it able, partly through a necessity of its current fortunes, to rebuild bridges, tap into different reservoirs of political imagination and re-mobilise a largely depoliticised movement?

Many will claim to already know the answer to these questions. However, turbulent times and electoral volatility have proven their capacity to unravel the predictions of even the most brilliant political forecasters on these islands.