Brexit as a critical juncture in the politics of UK devolution: A comparative analysis of the effects of Brexit on parties’ territorial strategies

In this paper, we theorise Brexit as a critical juncture and analyse its effects on devolution using the concept of regional authority. We argue that the 2016 Brexit referendum result opened an historically plausible option of institutional reform to re-balance the self-rule and shared rule dimensions of regional authority present in UK devolution. On this basis, we generate hypotheses about how Brexit affected parties’ territorial strategies and test them against the results of a content analysis of 2015 and 2017 UK general election manifestos. We show that the 2017 manifestos saw substantial growth in the proportion of territorial policy proposals dealing with shared rule, compared to the 2015 manifestos. At the same time, we observe considerable consistency in parties’ overall territorial policy positioning. In line with the wider trend, the governing Conservative party devoted more space in their 2017 manifesto to shared rule proposals than in 2015. However, their engagement with shared rule ideas largely excluded proposals that would enhance regional authority. Furthermore, the Conservatives’ territorial policy positioning shifted from favouring a relative increase in regional authority in 2015 to the cusp of maintaining the status quo and somewhat reducing regional authority in 2017. This helps to explain why, despite the opportunity afforded by Brexit for re-balancing self-rule and shared rule in the UK’s regional authority structure, post-Brexit UK government policy maintained a primary focus on self-rule and limited the further development of regional authority.