The Dynamics of Devolution: Nested Policy Making in UK Policing Governance

• In Event: When Other Governments Matter: Policymaking in Federal Systems

Abstract

The organisation of political life is accepted as being key to understanding the dynamics of political action (March and Olsen, 1984). Institutionalists point to the logic of institutional arrangements as being both long lasting and well understood by political actors offering guidance to the ‘rules in use’ political actors draw on when taking policy action (Thelan and Mahoney, 2010; Olstrom, 1999, Lowndes and Roberts, 2013). In unitary political systems with parliamentary democracies, such as the UK, it is traditionally understood that the national constitutional arrangements will dominate political actions in other political venues and that local and subnational political authority is weak (Wilson and Game, 2011). But what happens when the rules of the game are disrupted at the subnational level and executive authority is ceded to localities?
In this paper we investigate the urban political dynamics in UK policing governance following the introduction of directly elected Police and Crime Commissioners in England and Wales. These new political actors, first elected in 2012, operate within the still dominant central state in the UK and alongside a diffuse landscape of networked local governance (Gains and Lowndes 2014; 2018). The executive authority of commissioners is nested (Mackay, 2014) within the existing institutional arrangements of the Westminster system at central government level and alongside local authorities which previously administered the police authorities which oversaw local policing.
We present findings from a comparative case study of six police and crime commissioner areas in England and Wales during their first term of office*. We draw on site visits and in depth interviews with commissioners and all the key elite actors in those localities during commissioners’ first term of office. We explore the extent to which the new institutional arrangements reflect formal and informal institutional legacies to shape the ‘rules in use’ in policing governance (Lowndes, 2014). We examine how the commissioners interpreted and enacted the emerging rules in use to define and exert their political authority, how they set policing priorities and established the governing arrangements in their localities.
Our findings draw attention to the increasing importance of localities as key venues for agenda setting and policy prioritisation around policing governance even in unitary systems. We highlight the tensions which exist in ceding executive authority in a unitary system and how emergent rules in use were ‘borrowed, remembered and shared’ (Lowndes, 2005). We show how the newly elected commissioners sought to exploit the legitimacy their office provided and navigate the different governing logics of both national and local institutions. In concluding we point to the importance of informal ‘rules in use’ alongside the more formal powers assigned to the office.
*We acknowledge support of funding from the European Research Council (PI Georgina Waylen) see https://www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/politics/research/projects-and-networks/uic/
Bibliography
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Authors

• Vivien Lowndes, University of Birmingham

• Francesca Gains, University of Manchester