A Parliament for Wales

Abstract

Devolution in the UK, as former Welsh Secretary Ron Davies once famously stated, is a process, not an event, and I conclude my study by calling for the process to continue. Most supporters of devolution would likely agree that the principle of electoral representation is a baseline legitimating criteria of political decentralization, as is the institutionalization of a legislative process for meeting the particular needs of the UK’s cultural/economic peripheries. Devolution has undoubtedly created distinctly Welsh, Scottish, and Northern Irish political arenas in this sense, initially by territorial default but over time through policy/legislative divergence from London. Ten years on from the opening stages of this experiment in parliamentary democracy, however, a central question remains for many of its proponents and detractors alike: to what end? Whereas devolution can be said to be legitimate in the “thin” sense of meeting a legal/rational criterion of justifying power, the evidence presented on the actual practices of legitimacy in the National Assembly calls for a more nuanced assessment of devolution’s impact on UK democracy, if not the meaning of governance more generally. Curtice’s (2005: 107) analysis of the Scottish Parliament comes to a similar conclusion about making distinctions between the luster and substance of devolution: The legitimacy of the government in Scotland requires, it seems, the existence of an institution that is elected separately from anything that exists [in] England. Rather than to provide accountability or representation, the function of the Scottish Parliament elections may simply be to act as a ritual that provides that legitimacy [to the government]. But whether in the long run ritual alone will be sufficient to maintain the interest and participation of voters in Scottish Parliament elections is perhaps a more debatable question.