Welsh Journals

3. THE DEVELOPMENT OF WELSH TERRITORIAL INSTITUTIONS: MODERNIZATION THEORY REVISITED Barry Jones The devolution debate during the last two decades has tended to concentrate on the territorial aspects of the issue. This was probably inevitable given the conventional wisdom that most, if not all, political values and actions are capable of being explained in terms of social and economic factors. But the persistence of core-periphery distinctions and of territorial loyalties which tend to reflect informal and extra-institutional political processes, should not be allowed to obscure the fact that, as Bernard Crick has put it: 'institutions are the framework of political behaviour [and that] political ideas are about how institutions are, can and should be worked.' (1961, p.683) It is the intention of this paper to show how political institutions their growth and the roles which they play have influenced the Welsh devolution debate and invested it with a quality which distinguishes it from that in Scotland. Writing in the aftermath of the devolution referendums in 1979, Richard Rose sought to explain the continuity of the United Kingdom and came to the conclusion that: 'political institutions make the United Kingdom what it is.' (1982, p.2) Of course, all political systems are conditioned and constrained by their institutional structures. But the United Kingdom, with its weak historical tradition of popular sovereignty and an ambiguous notion of national identity, places more emphasis upon its political institutions and in particular Parliament than does its European neighbours.