Democracy, Devolution and the Political Economy of Scale in Britain

Vlahos, Nick

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-48729-4_6

Democracy, Devolution and the Political Economy of Scale in Britain

Nick Vlahos²

Chapter
First Online: 30 June 2020

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Abstract

The structuring of decentralization and devolution leads to larger debates about democracy. Democracy as a historical phenomenon must be understood in relation to economic development and the partisan contentions at interrelated scales of the state; not one or another scale, but all of them. This chapter draws together how competing coalitions of interest struggled for decentralization and devolution as a means to deliver democracy to subnational levels, and also how public participation is part and parcel of these struggles.

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Notes

1.
Pilon, Wrestling with Democracy, 4.
2.
Seymour Martin Lipset, “Some Social Requisites of Democracy,” American Political Science Review 53, 1 (1959): 85.
3.
James S. Coleman, “Conclusion: The Political Systems of the Developing Areas,” in The Politics of the Developing Areas, ed. Gabriel A. Almond and James Coleman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), 523.
4.
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5.
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6.
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8.
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9.
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10.
David Powell, Nationhood & Identity: The British State (London: I.B. Taurus & Co. Ltd., 2002), 157.
11.
Garner and Kelly, British Political Parties Today, 134–135.
12.
There was civil disobedience in the 1950s regarding the Korean War, decolonization, the Suez Crisis, and in the 1960s against the nuclear weapons programme, the race riots of the late 1960s, and the May 1968 Riots in France.
13.
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14.
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15.
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16.
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17.
Dickson (ed.), Scottish Capitalism, 281–282.
18.
Phillips, The Industrial Politics of Devolution, 15, 27.
19.
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20.
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21.
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22.
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23.
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27.
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28.
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29.
Matthew V. Flinders and Hugh McConnel, “Diversity and Complexity: The Quango-Continuum,” in Quangos, Accountability and Reform: The Politics of Quasi-Government, ed. Matthew V. Flinders and Martin J. Smith (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1999), 21; Matthew Flinders, “Setting the Scene: Quangos in Context,” in Quangos, Accountability and Reform: The Politics of Quasi-Government, ed. Matthew V. Flinders and Martin J. Smith (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1999), 5.
30.
Paul Hoggett, “A Farwell to Mass Production? Decentralisation as an Emergent Private and Public Sector Paradigm,” in Decentralisation and Democracy: Localising Public Services, ed. Paul Hoggett and Robin Hambleton (Bristol: SAUS Studies, 1987), 218, 220.
31.
The origins of the New Left in Britain came into being in 1956–1957 under the shock of the Hungarian uprising and the Suez crisis, which respectively led to a rejection of Stalinism and Western imperialism. Though organized labour was strong in Britain, it had faced significant setbacks during the Cold War period, and as a result of changing domestic and international conditions, a gradual process of labour movement transformation took place outside of the Labour Party : the creation of the New Left Review in 1957 reflected a new, young intelligentsia committed to issues facing the postwar generation; there was the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the push to withdraw from NATO in 1958; and lastly, a new generation of political activism was observed in the events of May 1968. University student revolts, the civil rights struggle in the United States, strikes and factory occupations in France, Germany and Italy, and the protests against the Vietnam War showcased a fresh wave of emancipatory and democratic radicalism in the late 1960s. Lin Chun, The British New Left (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), 1–2, 8, 13, 87, 98.
32.
Ian Holliday, “The New Suburban Right in British Local Government—Conservative Views of the Local,” Local Government Studies (1991): 45, 47–48.
33.
Coling Fudge, “Decentralisation: Socialism goes Local?,” in Local Socialism? Labour Councils and New Left Alternatives, ed. Martin Boddy and Colin Fudge (Hong Kong: Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1984), 194, 208; Holliday, “The New Suburban Right in British Local Government,” 48.
34.
See, for example, Russell Dalton, Susan Scarrow, and Bruce Cain, “New Forms of Democracy? Reform and Transformation of Democratic Institutions,” in Democracy Transformed? Expanding Political Opportunities in Advanced Industrial Democracies, ed. Brue E. Cain et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Samuel Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Oklahoma: The University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).
35.
See, for example, John Dryzek, Foundations and Frontiers of Deliberative Governance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Robert Goodin, Innovating Democracy: Democratic Theory and Practice After the Deliberative Turn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
36.
Mark E. Warren, “A Second Transformation of Democracy?,” in Democracy Transformed? Expanding Political Opportunities in Advanced Industrial Democracies, ed. Brue E. Cain et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 236–237.
37.
See, for example, Robert E. Goodin and John S. Dryzek, “Deliberative Impacts: The Macro-Political Uptake of Mini-Publics,” Politics and Society 34, 2 (2006): 219–244; Jane Mansbridge, James Bohman, Simone Chambers, Thomas Christiano, Archon Fund, John Parkinson, Dennis F. Thompson, and Mark E. Warren, “A Systemic Approach to Deliberative Democracy,” in Deliberative Systems, ed. John Parkinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Simon Niemeyer, Nicole Curato, and André Bächtiger, “Assessing the Deliberative Capacity of Democratic Polities and the Factors that Contribute to It” (paper presented at Democracy: A Citizens’ Perspective at Åbo, Finland, May 27–28, 2015).
38.
Ingolfur Blühdorn, “The Third Transformation of Democracy: On the Efficient Management of Late-Modern Complexity,” in Economic Efficiency—Democratic Empowerment, ed. Ingolfur Blühdorn and Uwe Jun (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2007), 300, 313–314.
39.
See Arend Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).
40.
Jonathan Hopkin and Jonathan Bradbury, “British Statewide Parties and Multilevel Politics,” Publius 36, 1 (2006): 147; Cairney, “The New British Policy Style,” 210–211, 216.
41.
Morphet, Changing Contexts in Spatial Planning, 4.
42.
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43.
Elin Royles, Revitalizing Democracy? Devolution and Civil Society in Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007), 3–4, 6, 43, 50, 148–149.
44.
I acknowledge that participatory and deliberative democracy should not be conflated; as Jürg Steiner claims, ‘deliberation does not mean any kind of talk’. Nonetheless, while appreciating their differences, I do feel as if these should be considered together when discussing the political economy of scale. See Jürg Steiner, “Concept Stretching: The Case of Deliberation,” European Political Science 7 (2008): 186.
45.
Steve Connelly, “Constructing Legitimacy in the New Community Governance,” Urban Studies 48 5 (2011): 929–930, 932–933.
46.
Thornley et al., “Business Privilege and the Strategic Planning Agenda of the Greater London Authority,” 1961.
47.
Lynne Humphrey and Keith Shaw, “Developing Inclusive Approaches to Regional Governance in the Post-Referendum North East,” Regional and Federal Studies 16, 2 (2006): 202, 205, 210.
48.
Vivien Lowndes and Helen Sullivan, “Like a Horse and Carriage or a Fish on a Bicycle: How Well do Local Partnerships and Public Participation Go Together?,” Local Government Studies 30, 1 (2004): 59.
49.
Humphrey and Shaw, “Developing Inclusive Approaches to Regional Governance in the Post-referendum North East,” 198–199, 202.
50.
At the most basic level, “Participatory budgeting allows the participation of non-elected citizens in the conception and/or allocation of public finances.” Yves Sintomer, Carsten Herzberg, Anja Röcke, and Giovanni Allegretti, “Transnational Models of Citizen Participation: The Case of Participatory Budgeting,” Journal of Public Deliberation, 8, 2 (2012): 2.
51.
Kezia Lavan, Towards a Local Area Agreement Participatory Budget Process (The PB Unit, 2007), 2–4.
52.
Nelson Dias, “Twenty-Five Years of Participatory Budgets in the World: A New Social and Political Movement?,” in Hope for Democracy—25 Years of Participatory Budgeting Worldwide (Nelson Dias Organization, 2014).
53.
Yves Sintomer, Carsten Herzberg, and Anja Röcke, “Transnational Models of Citizen Participation: The Case of Participatory Budgeting,” in Hope for Democracy—25 Years of Participatory Budgeting Worldwide (Nelson Dias Organization, 2014), 29.
54.
Terry Maley, “Participatory Budgeting and the Radical Imagination: In Europe but Not in Canada?,” Affinities: A Journal of Radical Theory, Culture, and Action 4, 2 (2010). Scholars have argued that Porto Alegre produced six key outcomes: it included the poor in decision-making, it broke down clientelist relations, redistributed urban infrastructure provision, built and democratized civil society, developed administrative capacities and promoted radical democracy Rebecca Abers, Igor Brandão, Robin King, and Daniely Votto, Porto Alegre: Participatory Budgeting and the Challenge of Sustaining Transformative Change (World Resources Report, 2018).
55.
For example, in 1996, over fourteen thousand people participated in two regional assemblies, an amazing turnout by any standard. In addition, by 1996, 98% of households had water and 85% had a sewage system as a result of the redistributive formula included in the budgeting process, whereas prior to participatory budgeting, only 49% of households had these basic services. Boaventura de Sousa Santos, “Participatory Budgeting in Porto Alegre: Toward a Redistributive Democracy,” Politics & Society 26 (1998): 461.
56.
A lot of literature has been produced in the new millennium about public apathy towards formal political institutions, voter and party membership decline. For a couple of examples, see Russell J. Dalton and Martin P. Wattenberg (eds.), Parties Without Partisans: Political Change in Advanced Industrial Democracies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Oliver Heath, “Explaining Turnout Decline in Britain, 1964–2005: Party Identification and the Political Context,” Political Behaviour 29, 4 (2007).
57.
For comparative research on participatory budgeting applications in Europe (and abroad), see, for example, Yves Sintomer, Carsten Herzberg, and Anja Röcke, “Participatory Budgeting in Europe: Potentials and Challenges,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32, 1 (2008); Ernesto Ganuza and Gianpalo Baiocchi, “The Power of Ambiguity: How Participatory Budgeting Travels the Globe,” Journal of Public Deliberation 8, 2 (2012); Gianpalo Baiocchi and Ernesto Ganuza, “Participatory Budgeting as If Emancipation Mattered,” Politics & Society 42, 1 (2014).
58.
SQW, Cambridge Economic Associates, Geoff Fordham Associates, Communities in the Driving Seat: A Study of Participatory Budgeting in England—Final Report (Department for Communities and Local Government, 2011).
59.
Heather Blakey, “Participatory Budgeting in the UK: A Challenge to the System?,” Participatory Learning and Action 58 (2008): 63.
60.
Kezia Lavan, Participatory Budgeting in the UK: An Evaluation from a Practitioner Perspective (PB Unit, 2007), 45.
61.
SQW et al., Communities in the Driving Seat, 12–13.
62.
Matthew Ryan, Advancing Comparison of Democratic Innovations: A Medium-N Fuzzy-Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis of Participatory Budgeting (PhD Dissertation, University of Southampton, 2014), 180.
63.
Lavan, Participatory Budgeting in the UK, 23.
64.
Blakey, “Participatory Budgeting in the UK,” 62–63.
65.
Lavan, Participatory Budgeting in the UK, 74.
66.
See, Emyr Williams, Emily St. Denny, and Dan Bristow, Participatory Budgeting: An Evidence Review (Public Policy Institute for Wales, 2017).
67.
Chris Harkins and James Egan, The Role of Participatory Budgeting in Promoting Localism and Mobilising Community Assets: But where next for Participatory Budgeting in Scotland? (Glasgow Centre for Population Health, 2012), 8.
68.
C. Harkins, K. Moore, and O. Escobar, Review of 1st Generation Participatory Budgeting in Scotland (Edinburgh: What Works Scotland, 2016), 4.
69.
As Baiocchi and Ganuza comment, “one clear consequence of the transformation of Participatory Budgeting into a best practice has been the marginalization of social justice principles that inspired the initiative in the first place. Its principal justification now has to do with good governance and the universal participation, which fits well with the neutral and technical language of Participatory Budgeting.” Baiocchi and Ganuza, “Participatory Budgeting as If Emancipation Mattered,” 42.
70.
Joe Painter, “Binary Ambiguities,” Political Geography 41 (2014): 37.
71.
Bob Jessop, “The Organic Crisis of the British State: Putting Brexit in its Place,” in Brexit and the Political Economy of Fragmentation: Things Fall Apart, ed. Jamie Morgan and Heikki Patomäki (New York: Routledge, 2018).
72.
Aileen McHarg and James Mitchell, “Brexit and Scotland,” The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 18, 3 (2017): 518.
73.
For details concerning emerging elite-control mechanisms and the application of UK referendums, see Stephen Tierney, “Reclaiming Politics: Popular Democracy in Britain After the Scottish Referendum,” The Political Quarterly 86, 2 (2015).
74.
See, for example, Dennis Pilon, “The 2005 and 2009 Referenda on Voting System Change in British Columbia,” Canadian Political Science Review 4, 2–3 (2010); Dennis Pilon, “Investigating Media as a Deliberative Space: Newspaper Opinions about Voting Systems in the 2007 Ontario Provincial Referendum,” Canadian Political Science Review 3, 3 (2009).
75.
Adrian Vatter, “Consensus and Direct Democracy: Conceptual and Empirical Linkages,” European Journal of Political Research 38 (2000): 174–175; Silvano Moeckli, “Direct Democracy and Political Participation from a Cross-National Perspective,” in Participatory Democracy and Political Participation: Can Participatory Engineering Bring Citizens Back In?, ed. Thomas Zittel and Dieter Fuchs (New York: Routledge, 2007), 107, 120–122.
76.
Matthew Flinders, “Efficiency Versus Accountability?: Modernizing Governance and Democratic Renewal in Britain, 1997–2005,” in Economic Efficiency—Democratic Empowerment, ed. Ingolfur Blühdorn and Uwe Jun (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2007), 182–183.
77.
Grant Jordan, “Policy Without Learning: Double Devolution and Abuse of the Deliberative Idea,” Public Policy and Administration 22, 1 (2007): 48–49.
78.
Peter Wilkin and Carole Boudeau, “Public Participation and Public Services in British Liberal Democracy: Colin Ward’s Anarchist Critique,” Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy 33 (2015): 1331; Lynn A. Staeheli, “Political Geography: Democracy and the Disorderly Public,” Progress in Human Geography 34, 1 (2010): 69, 75.
79.
Ian O’Flynn and Nicole Curato, “Deliberative Democratization: A Framework for Systemic Analysis,” Policy Studies 36, 3 (2015): 299.
80.
Dryzek, Foundations and Frontiers of Deliberative Governance.
81.
Morgan, “The Polycentric State: New Spaces of Empowerment and Engagement?,” 1248.
82.
Flinders, “Majoritarian Democracy in Britain: New Labour and the Constitution,” 67.
83.
Beel, Jones, and Jones, “Elite City-Deals for Economic Growth?,” 315; Brenton Prosser, Alan Renwick, Arianna Giovannini, Mark Sandford, Matthew Flinders, Will Jennings, Graham Smith, Paolo Spada, Gerry Stoker, and Katie Ghose, “Citizen Participation and Changing Governance: Cases of Devolution in England,” Policy & Politics 45, 2 (2017): 253.
84.
The significance of citizens’ assemblies lies in their design. They tend to be stratified to be reflective of the demographics of the populace, which are generally selected via random lottery, and they offer participants the opportunity to deeply engage in a subject by extensive education and deliberation phases. For a detailed background on the first Citizens’ Assembly applied in the world, see Mark E. Warren and Hilary Pearse, ed., Designing Deliberative Democracy: The British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
85.
Brenton Prosser, Matthew Flinders, Will Jennings, Alan Renwick, Paolo Spada, Gerry Stoker and Katie Ghose, “Pedagogy and Deliberative Democracy: Insights from Recent Experiments in the United Kingdom,” Contemporary Politics 24, 2 (2018); Matthew Flinders, Katie Ghose, Will Jennings, Edward Molloy, Brenton Prosser, Alan Renwich, Graham Smith, and Paolo Spada, Democracy Matters: Lessons from the 2015 Citizens’ Assemblies on English Devolution (Sheffield: University of Sheffield, 2016).
86.
Alan Renwick, Sarah Allan, Will Jennings, Rebecca McKee, Meg Russell, and Graham Smith, The Report of the Citizens’ Assembly on Brexit (University College London, The Constitution Unit, 2017), 8.

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Vlahos, N. (2020). Democracy, Devolution and the Political Economy of Scale in Britain. In: The Political Economy of Devolution in Britain from the Postwar Era to Brexit. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48729-4_6

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48729-4_6
Published: 30 June 2020
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
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Online ISBN: 978-3-030-48729-4
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