Devolution, Decentralization and Public Opinion in Wales and Brittany

Cole, Alistair [Cardiff University] Baudewyns, Pierre [UCL]

This article is based on a large research project that investigates processes of regional governance in two cognate yet distinctive 'regions': Wales and Brittany. Using a mix of most similar and (especially) most different comparative methodologies, we compare two similar regions at different stages of institutional development in two rather distinctive state settings faced with a range of comparable policy problems. We use support for forms of political autonomy in the main as a dependent variable, allowing elucidation of similarities and differences between Wales and Brittany. We also treat support for regional political autonomy as an intervening variable, in order to throw light upon the interplay between processes of institutional path dependency, policy convergence and 'territority' and to draw some more general conclusions from the Wales-Brittany comparison.