Citizenship after Devolution in the United Kingdom: Public Attitudes in Scotland and Wales

Abstract

Until quite recently the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland was often regarded as a ‘unitary state’; indeed, in many eyes it was the quintessence of that form of statehood. Whether this was ever actually the case is doubtful. Even at the mid-twentieth-century high point of the growth and consolidation of public authority in Westminster and Whitehall, there were always territorially distinctive patterns of governance across the United Kingdom. The existence until 1972 of a system of highly autonomous regional government in Northern Ireland was the result of a process of partial state disintegration with the secession in 1922 of the remainder of the island from the United Kingdom — initially in the form of the Irish Free State. But even beyond the special circumstances of Northern Ireland there were different legal systems in operation in different parts of the United Kingdom, territorially differentiated, and very distinctive patterns of church-state relations, and long-standing policy differences in fields such as education and local government. These differences were, in part at least, the legacy of the particular process of state formation from which the United Kingdom emerged. This explains why a small number of more territorially aware analysts preferred to characterize the United Kingdom as a ‘union state’ (Rokkan and Unwin 1982) rather than accept the ‘unitary state’ description that was otherwise so widespread (see also Kidd 2008).KeywordsWorld Value SurveyPolicy FieldSocial SolidarityInternational Social Survey ProgrammeInstitutional AuthorityThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.