The new British policy style: from a British to a Scottish political tradition

The new context of coalition government and the 'Big Society' suggests that the UK government is moving towards a style of politics followed successfully in Scotland, extending a partnership approach from national to local forms of government. Yet the two arenas have never been as far apart as is commonly imagined. The majoritarian (UK) and consensus (Scottish) labels are misleading. British politics is not as exceptional as it is often made out to be, while Scottish politics retains many elements of its British counterpart. This article assesses the state of British politics in this light. It sets out a counter-exceptionalism thesis based on the theory and evidence from public policy. It then summarises the post-devolution evidence, producing insights on the British policy style when compared to the 'new politics' in Scotland. Keywords: policy styles; policy communities; British politics; devolution; Scotland It is too easy to present the British political tradition 1 as exceptional or unusual based on a simple caricature: it preserves representative over other forms of democracy; is a majoritarian system with a concentration of power; its leaders are presidential; its politics are adversarial; policy making is top down without due consultation; departments are hierarchical and run by command and control; and so on. The aim of this article is not to reject this caricature out of hand (since it is possible to confirm elements of it in particular circumstances). Rather, it rejects its use as shorthand; as something whose pervasiveness is asserted much more than it is demonstrated. It argues that most of the more convincing literature does its best to present a different way to understand British politics. This literature has two forms. Public policy theory identifies elements of policy making that transcend political systems and qualify the idea that some are unique. For example, all political systems contain boundedly rational decision makers and policy-maker attention lurches from issue to issue in all systems because no actor has the ability to consider all issues. Similarly, no core executive has the ability to control all aspects of the policy process. Instead, they devolve most decision making to lower levels within (and, perhaps increasingly, outwith) the government machine. The empirical material often investigates the idea of British peculiarity and finds that the evidence does not match the rhetoric; British governments operate in much the same way as their European counterparts. This approach flourished with the study of policy communities and networks (and implementation) and continued with the current focus on governance -work that points to a considerable diffusion of power, and a debatable amount of central government control of the policy process, within the British system