Introduction
In the 1950 general election in the UK, the Conservative, Labour and Liberal parties won 99% of the popular vote and 100% of legislative representation, a pattern that remained virtually unchanged over the next two decades. Meanwhile, regional parties like the Scottish National Party or the Welsh Plaid Cymru registered support that collectively amounted to far less than 1% of the total votes throughout the same period. Yet by 2000 many of the political aims of these regional political players would be accomplished, with the establishment of devolved regional parliaments after 1997 and the regular election of their own members to the national parliament in Westminster since the 1970s. The success of this regional politics with its focus on decentralizing the UKās traditionally centralized form of political power is surprising as it goes against the grain of most of the twentieth-century British politics. Just how the country shifted from a seeming consensus for a nationally focused polity in the 1950s to a more devolved one at the turn of the century has produced much debate about the actual factors that have led to what amounts to a profound shift in the political status quo.
As is often the case, the story is more complicated than first appears. Reforms to the economic and political institutions in post-World War II Britain have entailed shifts in how they are organized at different levels of the state. Traditionally and conventionally, the UK has been viewed as top-down governing configuration, to the point that it has often been considered the bastion of centralization among developed democracies. To observers, this was reinforced by the constitutional practice of parliamentary supremacy at Westminster, where the dominant governing political party of the day was āunencumberedā by any competing jurisdictions, be they regional or hierarchical, in implementing any national legislation they devised. The single-member plurality electoral system reinforced this by tending to produce legislative majority Labour or Conservative governments. Despite their competing partisan allegiances, both parties long remained wedded to the ideal of Britain as a unitary state.
Nonetheless, measures for devolving legislative powers from the national level to regional levels were introduced at Westminster in 1997, with the caveat that regional populations had to support devolution through separate popular votes. In 1998, referendums were passed in Scotland and Wales, inaugurating a new era in British politics. The implementation of devolution led to a reconfiguration of the British constitution; indeed, some have argued that the policy package implemented by the Labour Party at the time was the most important since the Reform Acts of the nineteenth century.1 This is interesting because for most of the twentieth century the British left tended to view devolution as incompatible with socialist aims to take democratic control of the commanding heights of the economy, and particularly after World War II as inconsistent with Keynesian demand management. Anything but a centralized approach to social policy and economic planning was a threat to a key pillar of the welfare state, namely the uniform provision of social services across Britain. However, things shifted by the late 1990s when the Labour Party sought devolution as the key to what they called āmodernizationā. The economic context had changed, and the era was dominated by a new paradigm committed to supply-side economic policies influenced by new right-wing thinking and neoclassical economics, which encouraged among other things the downloading of responsibility to other levels of the political system. But within the ranks of the left, devolution was also increasingly held in esteem for its potential to further democratize British government and placate regional populations unhappy with the methods of governance employed by the Conservative Party led by Margaret Thatcher and John Major.
By contrast, the right had traditionally viewed devolution, for the most part, as inconsistent with the sovereignty and security of the national level, though there was some scattered right-wing support for Scottish Home Rule. Overall, Britishness rather than regional identity was more relevant to the Conservatives. Even by the time that devolution became law in the late 1990s, decentralization of this magnitude was being opposed by the political right for its potential to break up the state. However, over time the Conservatives have come full circle regarding devolution. Now, they also view it as an engine for Britainās economic competitiveness in a global economy, consistent with the view that regions are economic innovators. Moreover, devolution deals between local and national authorities are now being negotiated by recent Conservative-led governments.
Even though the postwar political system was dominated by two parties and showed no signs of letting up, Britain in the twenty-first century boasts a regionalized union state that is contested at the margins by multiple parties. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own elected legislatures, accountable to regional populations and with alternative electoral systems that differ from what is used at the national level. These institutional reforms are no small feat considering that similar reforms fell short in 1979 when Scotland and Wales were unable to secure devolution via referendums. The failure at that time is somewhat surprising when we reflect on the decline of two-party dominance at the national level in the 1970s, amid what appeared to be intractable economic decline and a concomitant rise of nationalist politics in the form of a dramatic legislative breakthrough for the Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru. Yet it was roughly twenty years after these events took place that constitutional reform was finally secured, at a time when nationalist voting had declined. All of which makes devolution both a fascinating and a perplexing phenomenon to consider.
Political scientists tend to regard constitutions and institutions as difficult to change, which begs the question: Why and how does the dispersal of power like devolution take place? Some studies have attempted to shed light on this question but often approach it in a way that describes decentralization as an inevitable by-product of an inexorable economic and technological transformation (globalization) that is external to partisan struggle.2 Economic factors and the possible politics behind them have been given much less attention. More broadly, the common themes associated with designing new institutional means of decision-making tend to fall into one of four categories: pluralistic group activity/demands for a more inclusive political system; the need to find new functional methods to govern advanced industrial societies; local as well as regional dissidence produced by social movements and political actors; and sheer political will and the strategic calculations made by political parties in power.
Aspects of Britainās recent devolution are clearly unique to the UK. A major reason for this is the historic asymmetry of regional institutions responsible for social, economic and urban development. Not all regions can be considered equal when it comes to devolved political and fiscal powers, either now or in the past. There is also a history of peripheral resistance by Scotland, Wales and Ireland that has influenced the politics of place and identity in the UK.3 At the same time, the UKās recent devolution is in line with an international trend towards decentralizationāas in the political, administrative and/or fiscal authority granted to regional and/or local levelsāwhich makes it an interesting case for comparison. Much work has been done attempting to explain how and why political reform has been occurring across the world in terms of the partisan motivations and contested relationships involved in designing and reforming decentralized political institutions.4 Here, a deep examination of the reasons reform has occurred in the UK can then be brought into dialogue with this broader comparative work. Accordingly, this book will examine devolution as a case study of this Western trend of decentralization and its relation to broader questions of institutional and democratic reform, focusing on Britain from the postwar period to the present, with attention to the overlooked role of political economy.
Why Study Devolution and Decentralization?
With modern democratic states like Britain being restructured, scholars have been examining new and previously under-appreciated forms of institutional organization including devolution (as a type of decentralization), drawing attention to the changing spatial characteristics of state power and democratic politics. Expanding literatures have sought to decentre the entrenched role of the national scale as the predominant locus for state activities and question the internal coherence of national economies and civil societies.5 Broadly speaking, the examination of decentralization is relevant given the dramatic changes that many Western states have undergone in recent decades. In the 1960s, regions became an important basis for administrative and political mobilization across Western countries. The literature points out that the 1970s marked the beginning of a decisive turn towards the creation of intermediary levels of government. This phenomenon has been referred to as the rise of āmesoā government. Just as democratization has been said to occur in waves starting with developed and then in developing countries, the first wave of post-World War II thinking on decentralization focused on what has been termed the deconcentration of hierarchical government structures, namely the implementation of regionally administered outposts of the national bureaucracy. The second wave of decentralization, beginning in the mid-1980s, broadened the concept to include political power sharing, democratization and market liberalization, expanding the scope for private sector decision-making. During the 1990s, decentralization was a way of opening governance to wider public participation through organizations of civil society.6 Clearly, some of these aims have proven to be in tension with others, like market liberalization and increased public input.
There are many possible examples of institutional reform that could be described as decentralizing or deconcentrating political and/or fiscal power. For example, a decentralizing thrust was observed in Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s when reforms swept across almost every country in the region. It was claimed that such changes were implemented to strengthen the role of local and regional governments. At the same time, national governments were also abandoning various social programming efforts in favour of more neoliberal approaches to policy. Ultimately, the experiences in Latin America were not isolated; by the mid-2000s, sixty-three out of the seventy-five countries with a population of five million or more across the world came to experience some degree of decentralization since 1980.7 Many of these countries underwent transitions to elected...