Abstract
The aim of this article is to help identify the fundamental characteristics of the British policymaking system. It highlights an enduring conflict of interpretation within the literature. On the one hand, most contemporary analysts argue that the ‘Westminster model’ is outmoded and that it has been replaced by modern understandings based on ‘governance’. On the other, key ideas associated with the Westminster model, regarding majoritarian government and policy imposition, are still in good currency in the academic literature, which holds firm to Lijphart’s description of the United Kingdom as a majoritarian democracy. These very different understandings of British government are both commonly cited, but without much recognition that their conclusions may be mutually incompatible. To address this lack of comparison of competing narratives, the article outlines two main approaches to describe and explain the ‘characteristic and durable’ ways of doing things in Britain: the ‘policy styles’ literature initiated by Richardson in Policy Styles in Western Europe and the Lijphart account found in Democracies and revised in 1999 as Patterns of Democracy. The article encourages scholars to reject an appealing compromise between majoritarian and governance accounts.
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Notes
Note that the most high-profile debates take place within the governance literature, such as the Marsh/Rhodes debate, which invokes first principles ideas about ontology and epistemology to establish the best way to understand modern governance arrangements (Rhodes, 2011; Bevir and Rhodes, 2010; Marsh, 2008, 2012).
Freeman (1985, p. 467) noted that, before the emergence of comparative policy styles as a field of enquiry, ‘most political scientists had presumed that the peculiar and unique structure and organization of politics in particular countries – constitutional arrangements, party systems electoral devices and political cultures – produced distinctive public policies’. However, systematic cross-system investigations, using data on outputs, contradicted this assumption, finding cross-national similarities and that ‘politics was not a fundamental determinant of the policies of national states or their subdivisions’ (1985, p. 467; although note that Freeman’s argument is based on the, now less fashionable, idea that socio-economic processes are more important than policymaking process in determining policy outcomes – see Cairney, 2012a, pp. 113–117.
In developing his consensus democracy idea, Lijphart focused on undermining the traditional defence (clarity and political responsibility through alternating administrations determined by public electoral choice between manifestos) of two-party politics in the United Kingdom and the United States (the claimed virtues of the Responsible Party Government idea probably reached a high point in ‘Toward a More Responsible Party Government’ APSA Supplement, 1950). Lijphart (1999, p. 293) was rejecting the ‘responsible’ two-party model and, in fact, campaigning for what he later termed the ‘kinder, gentler qualities’ of consensus democracy. He described his approach as ‘prescriptive’ (1984, p. 209).
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Acknowledgements
This article is based on papers presented by Jordan and Cairney at the Graduate School of Law, Hokkaido University, September 2011. We would like to thank our host Professor Mikine Yamazaki.
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Jordan, G., Cairney, P. What is the ‘dominant model’ of British policymaking? Comparing majoritarian and policy community ideas. Br Polit 8, 233–259 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/bp.2013.5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/bp.2013.5