Part of Enlighten’s mission is to increase the level of debate about policy reform in Scotland. As well as publishing our own work, we seek ways to work with a broad range of individuals and organisations with expertise in all and any sectors, and of all political affiliations and none, to contribute fresh thinking, debate, challenge, and policy proposals.
As part of this work we were delighted to partner for a third year with Edinburgh University’s SWAY programme. Amélia Webber carried out an MSc dissertation based on our initial research topic on the impact of collaborative cross party working in order to implement significant public policy reform. This article forms Amélia‘s secondary output, while her dissertation can be read in full here.
It is no secret that many governments are currently encountering serious political and financial issues, facing increasing gridlocks and immobilism despite the urgent need for reforms in many sectors. The stakes keep rising, and so does the price of failure: the intensifying discourse of crisis and unpopular reforms surrounding politics causes significant losses of legitimacy when parties fail to deliver adequate change. When traditional parties fail to build consensus, votes polarise, thus creating a self-fulfilling prophecy tearing democracies from the inside.
Why is political cooperation so hard to obtain? The complexity of cooperation lies in the fact that its actors are situated inside the broader political system, which includes fragmented technical, financial, and political resources in different sectors. Since no actor alone has enough resources to solely influence political decision making, cooperation becomes obligatory if actors want to influence policy outputs; this is why cooperation is viewed as a desirable outcome in modern democracies.
When cooperation emerges across a range of institutional settings, it is frequently credited with producing self-enforcing, more durable and legitimate policy outcomes than adversarial alternatives; in other words, creating longstanding collaboration. Cooperation and cooperation are thus two distinct political results: cooperation describes a type of one-off, often transactional bargaining outcome. Cooperation can coexist with competition on other fronts, and does not necessarily require actors to share recognition of each other or build longer-term social relationships. Rather, actors rely on short-term calculations which show when interests align enough to make cooperation worthwhile; in other words, it is a stable pattern of interaction between actors who remain, in principle, adversaries. Collaboration, on the other hand, implies a long-term ongoing process of decision-making, often involving shared problem definition, pooled resources, and a degree of mutual trust, shared commitment and ownership over outcomes. Collaboration is usually framed as more demanding to sustain (it requires trust-building, repeated interaction, and binding structures) but also as producing more durable social buy-in than simple cooperation.
Where there is collaboration, there is greater buy-in from affected groups, better implementation, and a policymaking culture that involves a sense of social duty, which survives changes of government. This is the appeal that underpins the literatures on (neo)corporatism and, more recently, collaborative governance, both of which treat collaboration not as an accident but as something that can be institutionally engineered.
Guided by this interest in political cooperation, some scholars have sought answers through comparison with other democracies. When these policymakers and academics look at European political cooperation, there is the prevalent idea that they are culturally and structurally ‘stuck’ on different paths. Some suggest that the way they collaborate is fundamentally different, as if certain countries’ political actors were more willing to cooperate than at home. Similar to the myth of Bacon’s New Atlantis, it is the idealisation of consensual results without studying what actually brought it on. Take for example the case of Luxembourg: a small country with a longstanding corporatist tradition, and a system of interest representation that has successfully delivered consensus on socio-economic policies for more than fifty years. In comparison, the UK’s corporatist attempts in the 60s-70s failed to deliver any meaningful policy change, before being rejected and repudiated.
However, even in the ‘cold climate’ of the Westminster system, there has been a recent case of institutional engineering targeted toward corporatist cooperation. The Social Partnership and Public Procurement (Wales) Act 2023 is a path-breaking attempt by the Senedd Cymru to build collaborative infrastructure without a corporatist history to support it, placing it in a uniquely hybrid system of interest representation, with an equally unique set of structural, historical, and process-related factors. To tackle the Welsh political cooperation case, we built a typology of the main factors that impact collective policymaking. This typology has three levels: the macro-level, which are the overarching structural factors shaping democracies and their governance models; the meso-level, which are socio-cultural and historical factors, and finally the micro-level, which are factors related to individual processes of collective bargaining.
Despite the Act still being in its early stages, it ultimately reveals that consultation obligations are a necessary but insufficient condition for lasting collaboration: the structural and social factors of our typology must also be studied. That gap between designing new institutions and building the social willingness to populate it is a usually invisible condition for collaboration; the Welsh case is thus analytically interesting for historical institutionalism because it shows that path dependency is real but not absolute.
Macro-level: Size, Elections, Interest Representation
The size of a country does have a heavily constraining effect on policymaking, but not in the way we might expect. A country’s size affects how it survives in capitalist systems: small countries are more open and vulnerable than large ones, economically, politically, and militarily. Size forces economic openness, which historically impacted industrial organisation, which in turn shaped political regimes and interest representation models. To survive in an increasingly globalised world market, many small European states were forced to develop functional internal coordination and consensus. The usual adversarial relationship between state, capital and workers became entangled: the logic of economic vulnerability prevailed over the logic of worker militancy in forcing political outcomes, especially on maters of consensual wage bargaining. This meant that for socio-economic matters, these states integrated worker’s unions directly into the decision-making process, creating institutions that reduced the uncertainty actors have about the behaviour of others, enabling greater commitment and collaboration. This type of industrial organisation functionally brings sectoral-specific firms and workers interests closer, because they have invested in many common assets like industry-specific schemes, sector-wide agreements and contracting networks, which reinforces cooperation.
As a small country in a devolved context, Wales’ size and industrial history are thus of great importance for political cooperation. While Welsh politics are quite different from the rest of the UK, Wales has known similar economic history. The fact that the Social Partnership Act still passed is therefore a strong empirical result: it suggests the enabling conditions outlined in our typology were strong enough to work against the structural predictions. Because of its industrial history, Wales had a traditionally dominant Welsh Labour party. From a policymaking standpoint, it meant that Welsh national institutions have overwhelmingly been built by Welsh Labour, all the while being confined within devolution’s limits and confronted with a wider climate of adversarial politics. As a consequence, executive ability was at a premium, electing greater detailed interest in the implementation of public policy, leading ministers to be especially concerned with multi-level politics. Therefore, Welsh Ministers have more experience considering strategic allies and opponents, unlike Westminster’s single-party cabinets. This combination of one-party dominance and devolution puts Wales in a very different position, making the setting up of devolved expert committees and corporatist practices a much more salient option.
The Welsh electoral system also breaks away from the Westminster model: from 1999 to 2021, Wales used the Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) system, combining FPTP constituency seats with proportional regional seats (PR), which already shaped party politics differently. The recent breakage of the historical Labour hold showcases this electoral shift. Welsh Labour had been progressively losing steam; after a first formal coalition in 2007, it then entered a co-operation agreement with Plaid Cymru in 2021 (which at the time finished 3rd in the elections), a large policy collaboration agreement on almost 50 devolved policy areas. Many of their collaborative goals involved setting up committees or expert groups. While the agreement fell through after leadership changes, this set up a precedent for cooperative opportunities. Adam Price, leader of Plaid, said the agreement was a ‘radical counterpoint’ to the confrontational nature of Westminster politics. The Act’s passage overlapped with this Welsh Labour-Plaid Cymru cooperation agreement, and the government explicitly credited Plaid Cymru as partners in getting it through.
From a theoretical standpoint, the Welsh mode of interest representation is not distinguishable from the UK’s pluralist model. However, upon closer look, Welsh institutions do have their own history. With deindustrialisation came several alarming diagnoses for the Welsh economy: in response, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) set up the Wales TUC (WTUC) in 1974, despite little support from the then-corporatist Westminster government. The WTUC, with its own parallel economic development infrastructure, constitutionally established itself as a distinct and autonomous part of the wider trade union movement: a union confederation acting as an economic development actor in its own right, not merely lobbying state agencies. Following the failure of British corporatism, Thatcher’s election did not help the growing gap between Wales and Westminster: facilitated by preexisting cleavages in Welsh society (social class, national identity and language), there was a growing sense that Wales needed its own national interest representation forum. Despite Thatcher’s attack on ‘the enemy within’, the WTUC acquired devolved-like powers long before the 1999 referendum, and has since maintained ongoing legitimacy. As a result of the historical prominence of Welsh unions, the consequences of devolution, and Welsh political culture, its path truly branched off from Westminster’s interest representation system.
Meso-level: Institutions, Legitimacy, Procedures
The Monmouthshire County Council 2025 Social Partnership report underlines the importance of past collaborative institutions for politico-industrial cooperation; the Act, in their words, is the culmination of this history of social partnership in Wales. The WTUC, by trying to manage industrial decline outside of parliamentary politics, remained a parallel institution: the Act, with its associated Duty, is what truly integrated this social partnership into law, as an example of institutional engineering. The Act thus did not create an institution out of thin air, and is a case of ‘layering’ cooperative institutions in a devolved Westminster model.
The lack of data regarding collective bargaining outcomes does not help build legitimacy for social partners: the Act tries to tackle this issue by requiring yearly reports on policy evolution to help them make evidence-informed decisions. Furthermore, the Act’s Theory of Change (ToC) points out the need for greater engagement from employers and government to achieve the Act’s intended outcomes, aiming to encourage cooperation and to establish the project’s legitimacy. Indeed, when power is shared, setting down clear rules becomes crucial: the ToC, by describing the Act’s logic, aims, resources, risks, assumptions, sources, and outputs, is a tool to accomplish this.
Notably, the council noted that ‘a change in government may impact the approach to social partnership, fair work and procurement’, questioning the long-term stability of the Act. This is why institutional engineering can only impact cooperation when accompanied by micro-level factors; political and contextual circumstances might change, even if stakeholders will still be bound by the Act’s Duty. Only procedural and relational commitment to cooperation, with access to the right institutions, can lead to longstanding collaboration.
Micro-level: Policy Area, Leadership, Psychological Factors
Micro-level factors are unfortunately largely under-reported, leaving us with little to analyse. The recent reports discussing the Act mention the importance of Chief Executive, board members and senior leaders championing social partnership. The Monmouthshire Council report described quarterly tripartite ‘Joint Advisory Group Meetings’ with a ‘commitment to gain consensus and agreement on all HR policies’, indicating that the psychological benefits of face-to-face dialogue are being reaped. We note that the policies being discussed in the Monmouthshire Council remain less controversial. The Act’s designated sectors (procurement, workforce well-being, and public services reform) are lower-conflict, technocratic and regulatory areas where unions and employers might already share broadly overlapping interests. In comparison, the more difficult redistributive or regulatory policies (like pay bargaining or industrial relations) are not yet reportedly being tackled by the Act. Perhaps after some more time spent building trust, these policies will surface.
Since the Act is being phased in incrementally, empirical evidence of its effects on policy outcomes is scarce. Regular reports from Ministers, social partners and press articles show where the Act is headed: in a positive, yet still incomplete direction. At the time of writing, reporting requirements guidelines were still changing to require more structure and transparency from social actors to ‘evidence their delivery of socially responsible outcomes’. Importantly, Wales still does not have an official peak organisation for employers; while they are involved in tripartite talks, the Act primarily targets trade union collaboration. However, employers’ implication in corporatist policymaking is crucial, especially for social policy. Moreover, recent reports point out that the Act’s coverage is only partial. While the public sector enjoys high union membership and bargaining frameworks characterised by strong coordination mechanisms, the private sector remains underrepresented. These workers are usually localised and lower-paid, intensifying the ‘geography of discontent’. Corporatism’s greatest weakness remains unaddressed: it seems Wales cannot yet rely on high voluntary engagement, the Act still being in its early developmental stages.
Conclusion
The Welsh case, illustrated by the Act, shows that a country’s political, historical, industrial and contextual path dependence constrains institutional development without wholly determining it. However, our results also showed that while Wales imposed a statutory duty on Welsh Ministers to consult social partners, to achieve long-term collaboration the Act also needs to create more relational opportunities, pointing directly at the social dimension of our typology. That gap between designing public forums and building the organisational capacity to populate it, is one of the absent conditions of the Welsh case: while going in the right direction, cooperation remains limited to less contentious policy areas like procurement, workforce well-being, and public services reform. It also neglects other sectors outside the public, intensifying representative and collaborative disparities. This risks yet another failed promise to Welsh workers, prompting some to say that ‘at this point in history, such a failure should not be countenanced’.
While we focused on corporatist organisations of interest, it is worth mentioning that the collective governance literature also made contributions about other modes of interest representation, as with syndicalism or more local civil governance, which also have cooperative potential. Further research could also take a comparative look at first-year compliance reports, studying how the Act works in practice in different policy areas and public bodies. Moreover, more micro-level reports should be available regarding political cooperation: we ought not underestimate how much human psychology defines everyday politics.
Amélia Webber is a recent graduate from the University of Edinburgh, with an MSc in International & European Politics as well as in Modern Languages and Publishing (French & English). Her dissertation can be viewed here.