Abstract
The creation of the Scottish Parliament was a major change in UK politics and the
empirical research presented in this thesis makes a significant contribution to
knowledge by revealing new evidence about some of the key political processes that
led-up to the new constitutional settlement. This thesis also addresses a gap in the
academic literature and offers a different approach by marshalling the evidence in
respect of a single individual actor: Donald Dewar. Whilst the existing literature
largely explains the success of the home rule movement by focusing on structural
changes in Scottish society - such as the politicisation of Scottish national identity -
this thesis focuses on the role of agents and institutions in four critical junctures in the
devolution debate. These are the process of writing and promoting the Labour Party's
1984 Green Paper on Devolution, the Labour Party's decision to participate in the
Scottish Constitutional Convention, the decision to hold a pre-legislative referendum
and the publication of the 1997 White Paper, Scotland's Parliament.
The research is informed by a historical institutionalist rationale and builds on
existing insights in the new institutionalist literature. One of the themes of this
research is that while changing circumstances and external crises can create pressure
for change, the way in which actors interact within institutions often defines the path
that is taken. Institutions are the arenas in which actors engage with new ideas and set
policy goals; they are the level at which individuals confront structural constraints and
scenes of ongoing political skirmishing. This thesis therefore puts a central focus on
understanding the inner life of the institutions in which policy on devolution was
made. Understanding new innovations and departures requires the researcher to build
a rich and detailed pictures of the circumstances in which actors form preferences and
build coalitions. The dissertation addresses this challenge by adopting a multi-method
approach that is both qualitative and historical - including process tracing,
documentary analysis and semi-structured individual interviews with elite actors.
The four 'nested' case studies presented in this thesis provide a detailed narrative that
connects the different stages of the devolution debate and enable us to identify causal
factors that played out over a long stretch of time. One remarkable feature of the
historical sequence from Margaret Thatcher's election as Prime Minister in 1979 to
the creation of the Scottish Parliament in 1999 is Donald Dewar's prominence from
an early stage to its completion. This is one of those rare occasions when the
decisions taken by an actor at particular points in the political process actually helped
to create the structural and institutional constraints that guided his own future actions.
One important new source of evidence that I have used to gain an insight into the
Labour Party's internal debate is the record of the monthly meetings of the
Parliamentary Labour Party: Scottish Group and the weekly meetings of the
Executive Committee of the Parliamentary Labour Party: Scottish Group, from 1983
to 1997. The thesis adds to the historical record and challenges the current academic
consensus about some of the key developments in the campaign for a Scottish
Parliament. It also intended to make a contribution to the wider theoretical debate on
the way in which agents interact within institutions and how this contributes to
political change.
