Formal and Informal Intergovernmental Institutions in the United Kingdom: Cooperation, Conflict and Political Influence
Final Report Abstract
The UK has gradually devolved a wide range of legal and fiscal powers to the Scottish Parliament, the National Assembly for Wales and the Northern Ireland Assembly, which has blurred the responsibility over legislations and policies. Meanwhile, the measures for joint decision-making and conflictresolution have remained underdeveloped. The UK’s exit from the EU has exposed the weakness of the existing intergovernmental arrangements and raised serious questions of territorial power, representation and influence. The UK’s loosely coupled intergovernmental negotiation systems has consequently faced growing political and functional pressures to integrate decision-making and policyimplementation. In this light, this project has examined formal and informal intergovernmental institutions and practices in the UK, patterns of cooperation and conflict between the different governments and the political influence of the devolved administrations on decisions made by the UK Government. This project has drawn on insights from comparative federalism to embed the particularities of intergovernmental relations in the UK within a wider global perspective on multilevel polities. While formal power sharing arrangements have been studied comprehensively in federations, the nature of informal intergovernmental relations in unitary polities is relatively underexplored and there is great potential for systematic in-depth case studies for informal interactions in unitary states. For this purpose, 55 qualitative interviews were conducted with representatives from the British, Scottish and Welsh Governments and Parliaments throughout 2019 and 2020. The first stage of this project has identified how the formal and informal institutions and practices structure the UK’s intergovernmental relations. While legally binding intergovernmental institutions have not been established in the UK, non-binding and institutions and practices characterised by weak institutional depth are vital for the interaction between the devolved administrations and the UK Government. The second stage of this project has analysed whether and why the different governments interact, cooperate or engage in conflict with each other. Examples from different policy areas indicate that functional and political interdependencies are strong predictors for non-interaction. Insights from policy areas that are functionally and politically interdependent confirm that, depending on the compatibility of their objectives, the preference intensity of an issue for either side determines whether they cooperate or end up in conflict. Although the threat of independence has given the Scottish Government more political weight over certain decisions of the UK Government, neither respondents from the Scottish Government nor the Welsh Government perceived themselves as having a strong political leverage. Party congruency is another central determinant for the nature of intergovernmental bargaining in the UK. While prior to 2010 much intergovernmental exchange was channelled through political parties, actors from different parties have struggled to build mutual trust and disputes have become more public with different parties in power. The relationship worsened remarkably in the courses of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum and the 2016 EU referendum. The third stage has examined the political influence that the devolved governments exert on polices and decisions of the UK governments. It shows that the Scottish and the Welsh Governments have influenced decisions of the UK Government, when the latter is particularly dependent on their cooperation, including constitutional issues, fiscal framework and agriculture policy. However, when an issue is highly salient for the UK Government, it has also chosen to ignore opposing views from the devolved administrations, in particular on reserved matters, such as trade agreements and immigration. Overall, the systematic in-depth research of this project has made an essential contribution to the empirical and theoretical knowledge about the relations between the different levels of government in the UK’s devolved unitary polity.
Publications
- (2020) The (dis-)integration of intergovernmental relations. Commentary on UK in Changing Europe, 28 February
Guderjan, M.
