The Democratic Challenge

Democracy can be defined as rule by the people, but that begs the questions of who are the people and what do they rule. As emphasised in the introduction to this volume, there is no single, grand theory of democracy but rather a series of democratic dilemmas. Since the emergence of democracy in modern Europe, these have been subordinated to a concept of the people rooted in the unitary nation, and a conception of rule reliant on the territorial, sovereign state. The two are linked in the concept of the nation-state, whereby the national people realises its ambitions. This actually represents an ideal type, or aspiration, as the European political order has always been more complex than that. The model is under stress, as a process of rescaling has taken functional systems, identities and political imaginations to new spatial levels, above, below and across the states. Rescaling is sometimes presented as a response to technical necessities and the search for Pareto-optimal solutions to social and economic problems. This can lead to a reinforcement of tendencies to depoliticisation, a neglect of distributive issues and a consequent loss of democratic engagement in policy. Yet these tendencies are countered by new challenges from losers and a repoliticisation and a search for new democratic spaces. There are campaigns for self-determination and, at the limit, secession, in Scotland, Catalonia and elsewhere. In several states, a new regional or ‘meso’ level of government has emerged while others have older federal traditions. Cities and metropolitan regions have become important sites for democratic exchange. In other cases, the nation-state remains the dominant focus for democratic self-expression.

The debate about the democratisation of the European Union (EU) has largely been confined to two territorial levels: that of the EU itself as an emerging polity; and that of the member states. The contribution of this chapter is to take a larger view of territory, encompassing the sub-state as well as the supranational level, linked in a common problematic of democratisation beyond the state. The argument is that, if government and regulation are operating at multiple and changing levels, democracy must keep pace with that.

The concept of nation in the United Kingdom is famously ambiguous. It has no juridical value but is a central element in constitutional debates. It can refer to either the whole state or to one of its component parts, England, Scotland, Wales and a part of Ireland. The name of the state, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, lacks a corresponding adjective; as Richard Rose remarks, ‘No one speaks of the “Ukes” as a nation’.1

The interaction between organised interests and public authorities forms a crucial ingredient of policymaking in contemporary democracies. In many countries, policymakers regularly seek advice from organised interests in order to acquire policy expertise, or to gain more insight into the policy preferences of a particular social group. The growing complexity of the policy environment also creates an increasing demand for external knowledge and societal support. As interest groups often have access to valuable information concerning governmental policies, they become important suppliers of policy advice. This chapter focuses on the policy-driven activities of interest groups, and their role as ‘service bureaus’ or policy advisers to policymakers (Hall and Deardorf, 2006). Policy advice is here defined as an opinion or recommendation offered as a guide for future policy (Brans et al, 2010). While this advice is typically non-binding when shared through informal contacts or consultations, it often has a more binding character when it is channelled via neo-corporatist structures for concertation.

Considering that information is seen as a crucial currency in the interaction between organised interests and public authorities, it seems highly relevant to examine how organised interests acquire and utilise this valuable resource. By specifically highlighting the role of policy expertise, the aim of this chapter is to complement the literature that considers organised interests primarily as advocacy groups, whose main goal is to shape the government's agenda and influence policymaking (for example, Baumgartner et al, 2009; Eising, 2009; Hojnacki et al, 2012). In the past two decades, much scholarly work in this area has focused on strategic matters. Researchers have, for instance, underlined the importance of networks for gaining access to policymakers (for example, Carpenter et al, 1998; Beyers and Braun, 2014), or argued that groups increasingly seek to build and maintain their reputation through regular media appearances or other forms of outside lobbying (Kollman, 1998; Andrews and Caren, 2010; Binderkrantz, 2012). These strategic considerations, however, cover only one aspect of interest group politics. Another key element, one that has been subject to investigation far less frequently, involves the way in which these groups acquire critical and up-to-date information, build policy-analytical capacity, and put this knowledge to use in their interaction with policymakers.

The problem

The chapters in this book have focused on policies to fulfil the declared ambition of the Scottish Government to achieve a wealthier and fairer nation. The aim is unexceptionable and supported by all parties, but notoriously difficult to achieve in practice. In line with international thinking, the Scottish Government has argued for a social investment approach and for preventive spending in order to secure the long-term future, drawing particularly on the experience of the Nordic states but also of other countries that appear to combine economic performance with social inclusion. Yet defining these concepts and putting them into practice is not easy. Long-term ambitions must compete with short-term pressures on spending. The needs of future generations must be set against those of the present. Investment in physical and human capital may not provide the immediate, tangible benefits that come from current spending. While social investment may address economic and social problems at the same time by expanding opportunities and bringing people into the well-paid part of the labour force, it does not in itself resolve the big issues of inequality. There is still a role to be played by redistribution, which implies winners and losers among individuals and groups. It is also inescapable that to achieve Nordic levels of public spending it is necessary to pay Nordic levels of taxation, which are higher than those currently prevailing in the UK.

In this chapter, we ask whether the support base for such a strategy exists. First, we examine public opinion in Scotland and compare it with that in the UK as a whole. We find that there is support for universal public services but that a broader sense of solidarity has fallen over recent decades. Scotland is only slightly more egalitarian than the rest of the UK. Then we consider how support for social inclusion and equality might be built, drawing on experience elsewhere. Finally, we examine the institutions and competences that Scotland has following the three devolution acts of 1998, 2012 and 2016.

In 2014, Scotland voted against independence but, following a pledge by the unionist parties, it then received additional powers over taxation and welfare. Added to existing powers devolved in 1999 and 2012, the Scotland Act (2016) endowed Scotland with the competences, potentially, to fulfil its ambition to create a wealthier and fairer nation. This book examines how this might be possible in practice. It will be of interest not only to students of Scotland but to all concerned with the potential of small nations and regions to master their own fates in a complex, multilevel world.

The book is the product of an interdisciplinary project in the Centre on Constitutional Change, funded by an Economic and Social Research Council grant, ES/L003325/1. The first book from this project (Keating 2017) examined the issues in the referendum debate, including institutions, economics, welfare and taxation and spending. This book looks to the future, returning to some of the same issues and asking how they might be resolved. Scotland's future constitutional status remains, at the time of writing, unresolved. The implications of UK withdrawal from the EU are unclear. As the chapters in this book show, the 2016 settlement, the result of a political compromise rather than a measured analysis of policy requirements, may not provide an optimal outcome. Whatever the political future, however, the question of how to reconcile economic growth with social justice and cohesion will remain.

Scotland after the referendum

The Scottish independence referendum of 2014 was a momentous event, which engaged the political class and the general public like few political events before it. The question on the ballot paper was, in appearance, a simple one with a straightforward answer, whether Scotland should be an independent country. A second question, on more devolution or a radical rearrangement of Scotland's relationship with the UK, was explicitly ruled out. Yet in practice, the two sides showed a degree of convergence on precisely this middle ground. One reason was that, as our research showed, public opinion was strongly clustered there (Liñeira, Henderson and Delaney 2017). Another was that, in the modern world, nations are interdependent and old ideas about sovereignty hide the limitations in the freedom of action of all but the most powerful states. So the debate moved quickly from dry constitutional issues to economic and social policy and how Scotland could achieve better outcomes, either in or out of the Union; it is this that accounts for the reach of the debate into civil society. Another feature of the Scottish debate was that it mostly did not pit different visions of future society against each other but rehearsed ways of achieving much the same goals. The two main parties in Scotland, while divided on constitutional matters, shared the same broadly social democratic ideology, while the Conservatives stayed in the political centre. Only a minority of voices called for a market-liberal model of state in which taxes would be cut and the scope of the public sector radically curtailed. So what the debate hinged on was whether large or small states are economically more efficient or whether social justice was better conceptualised and achieved at a UK or a Scottish scale. These issues are covered in another of our books, Debating Scotland (Keating 2017).

The referendum was followed by the Smith Commission. This was an all-party body set up to meet a pledge (the ‘vow’) made by the unionist parties in the last stage of the campaign to give Scotland more devolved powers but building on earlier work by the parties themselves.