Suchergebnisse

In Scotland, the formation of a minority government in 2007 by the Scottish National Party (SNP) provided the potential for profound changes in intergovernmental relations. This followed eight years of a Scottish Labour-led coalition government characterised by a low-key and informal relationship with the UK Labour government. From 1999 to 2007, discussions were conducted informally and almost entirely through political parties and executives (ministers and civil servants). Although formal mechanisms for negotiation and dispute resolution existed—including the courts, concordats and Joint Ministerial Committees—they were used rarely. The Scottish Executive also played a minimal role in EU policy-making. Yet, an 'explosive' new era of relations between the Scottish and UK governments did not arrive in tandem with the new era of party incongruence. The aim of this article is to explore these issues by asking two main questions: why were formal mechanisms used so rarely from 1999 to 2007, and what factors produced muted rather than problematic IGR in the third parliamentary session, between 2007 and 2011?

Intergovernmental relations (IGR) as a political principle and a mechanism of governance have played a major and distinctive role in Northern Ireland's political and constitutional development. This distinctiveness is apparent in the interpretation and scope of IGR, in party representation in intergovernmental fora and in the meaning and context of party incongruence. This article seeks to analyse the development and nature of IGR since the restoration of devolved government in 1999 but particularly since 2007, in light of this distinctiveness. It sets out the wide range and nature of the processes and institutions of IGR involving the Northern Ireland government and its form of consociational representation. The article then examines how the different political parties have engaged in IGR.

The EU has been making strong inroads into the realm of security over the last few years. This is a remarkable development, since security matters used to be the preserve of states. The articles presented in this special issue all testify to the breadth of the EU security agenda, as they all try to capture some aspects of the EU's fast-changing security policies following the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty on 1 December 2009. In parallel with a broadening of the EU's security agenda, an increase in supranational security governance in the EU can also be observed. The transition to supranational governance is reached in two ways. First, cross-border security threats generate demand for EU laws, which supranational organisations then supply. Reasons for changes in the EU polity are exogenous shocks, the fact that rule innovations are endogenous to politics, the diffusion of organisational behaviour and models of action, and policy entrepreneurship, whereby institutional entrepreneurs construct and revise 'policy frames', which engage other actors and define new relationships between them and chart courses of action. As the articles in this special issue demonstrate, 11 September 2001 provided such a major exogenous shock required for a change in the EU polity, which EU institutions exploited by providing increasing EU legislation, and even, as a by-product, stabilising a European legal order.