Aportes institucionales o adposición de decisiones

“A popular government, without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both.” (James Madison, 1822. Letter

to W. T. Barry)

Political knowledge has long been understood as playing a central role in the functioning of rep- resentative democracy. Heavily influenced by the writers of the US constitution, theorists of democ- racy have long argued that government can only be held to account for its actions when citizens know what it is doing (Downs,1957;Riker and Ordeshook,1968;Dahl,1971,1989,1998;Held,1996). A focus on political knowledge can also be traced back to the earliest works of quantitative political science. In Voting,Berelson et al.(1954) argue that “The democratic citizen is expected to be well- informed about political affairs. He is supposed to know what the issues are, what their history is, what the relevant facts are, what alternatives are proposed, what the party stands for, what the con- sequences are” (pp.308, see alsoLazarsfeld et al.,1944;Campbell et al.,1960). With this information, citizens are expected to judge incumbents and challengers by their records and reward or punish them at elections accordingly (Dahl,1989;Fiorina,1981). This bottom-up accountability mechanism is what provides incumbents with the incentive to be ‘responsive’ to citizens’ wishes, and legislate accordingly (Soroka and Wlezien,2010). After all, if citizens’ vote choice is not influenced at least to some degree by government performance, incumbents have little incentive to pursue policy goals that reflect citizens’ interests. As Verba writes, “democratic responsiveness depends on citizen par- ticipation” (Verba,1996, pp.2). Yet ever sinceConverse(1964)’s influential essay The nature of belief

systems in mass publics, political scientists have cast doubt on this foundational assumption that

citizens know enough about politics to make decisions effectively.

In Scotland and Wales, the establishment of the devolved institutions was championed as a pro-

cess that would increase the accountability of political actors and policies to the citizens of Scotland and Wales. UK Prime Minister Tony Blair prefaced the White Paper that constituted the blueprint for Scottish devolution ‘Scotland’s Parliament’ with the assertion that “a Scottish Parliament and a Welsh Assembly [will give] the people of Scotland and Wales more control over their own affairs within the UK” (The Scottish Office,1997, pp.v). In the same document, the inaugural First Minis- ter of Scotland Donald Dewar9wrote that “The Scottish Parliament will strengthen democratic con- trol and make government more accountable to the people of Scotland.” (The Scottish Office,1997, pp.vii). In the pre-referendum white paper A Voice for Wal similar ambitions are presented:“[t]he Government is committed to establishing a new, more inclusive and participative democracy in Britain. Its proposals for a Welsh Assembly reflect these aims”(The Wales Office,1997, pp. 3).

To date, researchers have not sought to assess whether citizens in Scotland and Wales have access to the necessary information to allow this accountability mechanism to function effectively. In mul- tilevel systems generally, existing evidence suggests we should not assume this to be the case.Soroka and Wlezien(2010) argue that non-unitary or decentralized political systems can provide unclear or confused government policy signals: the more levels of government making policy in various policy areas, the less clear it is to citizens what their ‘government’ is actually doing (Powell and Whitten,

1993;Downs,1999;Rodden,2004). This signal is further confused in multilevel systems like the UK where substantial proportions of the devolved governments’ budgets are transferred from cen- tral government. Here, multiple levels of government are involved in multiple policy areas but the actions of central government are not directly visible despite its out-sized role in determining the allocation of funds (Cutler,2004;Johns,2011b). What voters do - or don’t - know is likely to have an important impact on whether representatives are held to account in Scotland and Wales.

Political knowledge also has several benefits that extend beyond the mechanism of democratic accountability, namely that it can be thought of as a good in and of itself. Political information is an important resource for citizens and, asCarpini and Keeter(1996) argue, it is “a facilitator of other

forms of political and thus, indirectly, socio-economic power” (pp. 1). Yet political information is also more readily available to those citizens who are already socially, economically and politically ad- vantaged. Consequently, it is easier for these citizens to realize their interests through a democratic political system. It is imperative, therefore, to identify systematic barriers to accessing political in- formation where they exist. AsHabermas(1984) has argued, the health of a democracy can be mea- sured by the extent to which citizens are able to enter into public debate with equivalent amounts of information. Where citizens – or particular groups of citizens – do not have sufficient information, democracy can start to falter.Entman(1989) shows that what citizens know about politics shapes the parameters of political discourse more broadly. Where citizens are less informed, political campaigns will be more likely to use sensationalism and demagoguery to appeal to voters (Carpini and Keeter,

1996).

Carpini and Keeter(1993) argue that political knowledge is a crucial part of citizenship on the whole. How citizens engage with politics extends far beyond infrequent opportunities to cast votes. When citizens seek recourse for problems they face, political knowledge is an important factor in deciding how these problems are solved. Similarly, if citizens or groups of citizens have low levels of political knowledge, it is considerably more difficult for them to express their individual or collective interests at the ballot box.

That leads us to the question: what do citizens in Scotland and Wales know about politics? The limited amount of existing work carried out in this field has produced mixed results.Johns(2011b) analysis of voters at the 2007 Scottish Parliamentary election found that while ‘many voters’ were able to correctly assign policy responsibilities they were unlikely to use this knowledge in their decision-making calculus at election time. In Wales, in the sole existing study on this issueDafydd and Badanjak(2018) focused on attributions of responsibility among 2016 Welsh Election Study re- spondents finding that “few [voters] have the knowledge or the inclination to hold those in power to account.” (pp. 1). Analysis carried out elsewhere has also produced mixed results.Cutler(2004)

has suggested that many citizens are unable to say which levels of government are responsible for dif- ferent policy areas or decisions (see also Cutler,2008a). This is in part due to the behaviour of elites in multilevel systems. Work byRico and Liñeira(2018) has shown that mulitlevel structures of gov- ernance produce incentives for elites to ‘pass the buck’ by shifting blame across levels of government. Conversely,Rudolph(2003) found that citizens were able to more or less accurately apportion re- sponsibility to different levels of government.