Inter-parliamentary relations in the United Kingdom: devolution’s undiscovered country?

Since 1997, the United Kingdom’s territorial constitution has undergone an immense process of change and has resulted in the establishment of separate legislatures and governments for the peoples of Scotland, Wales and, when Stormont is operational, Northern Ireland. These changes have spawned a whole series of relationships between the institutions of the devolved UK, at executive, legislature and civil service levels. However, while intergovernmental relations has been the subject of repeated debate, there has been little attempt to document and examine the way in which the UK’s four legislatures interact with one another, post-devolution. To the extent that these interactions, otherwise known as inter-parliamentary relations (IPR), have been the subject of scrutiny, it has been largely to bemoan their modest state and/or to suggest that stronger, albeit occasionally rather unelaborated, mechanisms be established. This article seeks to correct this deficit and provide a first step towards a clearer understanding of IPR in the UK, post-devolution. The article breaks the different levels of IPR down into three main strands: (1) parliament-parliament, (2) committee-committee and (3) official-official, and suggests that the main interactions that take place at each of these levels. Following this audit, the article concludes by highlighting the role that shared policy competence (a field that is set to grow with the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union) has played in driving IPR in the UK, post-devolution, and suggests some steps that may be taken to enhance IPR in the future.     

Divided We Stand? Democracy as a Method of Processing Conflicts1

Conflicts, liberty and peace do not coexist easily. Through most of history, civil peace was maintained by the threat of force. Contemporary ideologues of authoritarian regimes maintain that political conflicts inevitably result in violence, and the founders of modern representative institutions in the West have shared this view. Yet we now know that political institutions can cope with conflicts, that conflicts can be structured, regulated and contained, and that purely procedural rules can be effective in processing conflicts. Most importantly, we have come to realise that choosing governments through competitive elections is the only way to foster political freedom in divided societies. Competitive elections support social peace by enabling political forces to think in inter‐temporal terms. In turn, civil peace is maintained between elections when when opposition groups expect to be reasonably successful within the halls of representative institutions.     

Aerial Bombing and Counterinsurgency in the Vietnam War

Aerial bombardment has been an important component of counterinsurgency practice since shortly after it became a viable military technology in the early twentieth century. Due to the nature of insurgency, bombing frequently occurs in and around settled areas, and consequently it tends to generate many civilian casualties. However, the effectiveness of bombing civilian areas as a military tactic remains disputed. Using data disaggregated to the level of the smallest population unit and measured at multiple points in time, this article examines the effect of aerial bombardment on the pattern of local control in the Vietnam War. A variety of estimation methods, including instrumental variables and genetic matching, show that bombing civilians systematically shifted control in favor of the Viet Cong insurgents.     

Ideology,Learning, and Policy Diffusion: Experimental Evidence

We introduce experimental research design to the study of policy diffusion in order to better understand how political ideology affects policymakers’ willingness to learn from one another's experiences. Our two experiments–embedded in national surveys of U.S. municipal officials–expose local policymakers to vignettes describing the zoning and home foreclosure policies of other cities, offering opportunities to learn more. We find that: (1) policymakers who are ideologically predisposed against the described policy are relatively unwilling to learn from others, but (2) such ideological biases can be overcome with an emphasis on the policy's success or on its adoption by co‐partisans in other communities. We also find a similar partisan‐based bias among traditional ideological supporters, who are less willing to learn from those in the opposing party. The experimental approach offered here provides numerous new opportunities for scholars of policy diffusion.