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Abstract
Institutions can affect the degree to which public opinion influences policy by determining the clarity of responsibility in decision-making. The sharing of power between national and devolved levels of government makes it difficult for the public to attribute responsibility for decisions. In the UK, this generates the prediction that the devolution of power to territorial units weakens the effect of public opinion on policy both for the UK and Scottish governments. To test this expectation, this paper analyses responsiveness of the legislative outputs of the UK and Scottish parliaments to the issue priorities of the public. It finds the policy-opinion link in the UK appears to be weaker since devolution to the Scottish Parliament in 1999 compared with the period between 1977 and 1998. It shows no evidence of a direct link between issue priorities of the Scottish public and legislative outputs of the Scottish Parliament.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The paper is an output of the research project, Legislative Policy Agendas in the UK, funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (Reference R105938). We thank the Council for its support. This paper was presented to the UK Political Studies Association annual conference, Manchester, 7–9 April 2009, Panel: Devolution and public policy: II. We thank the participants of the panel for their reactions and comments, as we do the editor and three anonymous reviewers. We are also grateful to Darren Halpin, University of Aarhus for his contribution to an earlier version.
Notes
The Scotland Act 1998 defined matters that are reserved to Westminster, with the remainder deemed to be ‘Devolved’ matters. According to the Scottish Government, devolved matters include policies in the areas of Health and social work; Education and training; Local Government and housing; Justice and police; Agriculture, forestry and fisheries; Environment; Tourism, sport and heritage; Economic development and internal transport. But, as McGarvey and Cairney (Citation2008: 159) point out, despite this apparent clarity in relation to the relative policy responsibilities of Westminster and Holyrood, in actuality there is considerable blurring of competences.
See, for example, the Scottish Constitutional Convention (1995).
This test of this hypothesis (H2) should not be affected by factors, such as delegation of powers to the EU, which have parallel effects in both jurisdictions.
UK acts on Scotland included acts of the UK Parliament that included ‘(Scotland)’ in the short title. We recognize that the UK parliament does still legislate on Scottish matters, via Sewel motions. Crudely put, this process enables Scottish elements to be tagged onto UK bills (that may stray into devolved areas), therefore removing the need for dedicated Scottish legislation (see discussion in Keating et al. Citation2003: 117–20). However, for the purposes of our analysis, we treat these UK bills subject to Sewel motions as non-Scottish Bills.
The use of MII rather than this aggregation of MII and OII lead to the same inferences. However, the combined measure did indicate a slightly more responsive UK Parliament in the pre-devolution period.
There is evidence that differences in question, wording of opinion polls about the ‘most important issue facing Britain’ and the ‘most urgent problem facing the country’ has little effect on variation in responses (see authors). Such questions ultimately capture what is on the public's mind, and the OII question in Scotland is capturing just that.
For this and all other analyses, the data on UK public opinion for 1999–2008 excludes the Scottish OII responses. This is consistent with our hypotheses. Note that the use of UK public opinion, including Scotland does not affect the direction, strength or significance of our findings.
The same inferences are drawn from correlation of legislative outputs to lagged public opinion.
In testing the appropriateness of inclusion of both devolution and party variables, we find that the best fitting model for the majority of issues is the model that includes just devolution. In just one case, a model that includes just party control is of superior fit to that including devolution.
Note that we find high serial correlation for the environment, but with this exception, there is no evidence of serious threats to inference for any of the other issues.