Which Government’s Policy Style is More Conducive to Prevention?

We have demonstrated that many governments face the same ‘prevention puzzle’, caused partly by universal drivers associated with multi-centric policymaking. Further, they face contradictory pressures to share power for pragmatic reasons or centralize power to seem in control. However, what if policymakers in different political systems try to solve these dilemmas in fundamentally different ways? For example, are some systems more conducive to long-term planning and more likely to facilitate central governments trying to ‘let go’ and encourage localism? This question is often central to comparative political studies involving the UK. The UK’s Westminster model often represents the archetype of a ‘majoritarian’ democracy with a top-down policymaking style and adversarial political culture. Lijphart contrasts it with ‘consensus’ democracy characterized by coalition-building between parties and political culture built on ‘inclusiveness, bargaining and compromise’. In theory, this distinction could guide our analysis of UK and Scottish preventive policymaking, since some ‘architects of devolution’ envisaged ‘new Scottish politics’ as the antidote to ‘old Westminster’, to produce a consensus democracy with greater emphasis on pragmatic policymaking. However, their reputations are inaccurate caricatures that provide a misleading way to compare UK and Scottish prevention policy.