Devolution

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Devolution looks like federalism from a distance and behaves nothing like it up close. Both hand governing authority to a regional body, and both let that body legislate on matters that concern its own territory. The difference is what backs the arrangement. A federal system's division of power is constitutional, which means changing it usually requires something harder than an ordinary vote, an amendment, a supermajority, sometimes ratification by the very units whose power is at stake. A devolved territory's authority rests on an ordinary statute passed by the central legislature, the same kind of law that created the devolved body in the first place, and what an ordinary law creates an ordinary law can amend or repeal. That is not a hypothetical risk; it is the express legal position in every devolved system, including the United Kingdom's. Spain complicates the picture without erasing the distinction: its regions now hold so much practical authority, with the central government accounting for only about a fifth of public spending, that observers sometimes describe it as federal in substance. But Spain remains constitutionally unitary, which means that substance, however extensive, still rests on power the centre gave and could, in principle, take back.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The United Kingdom did not devolve government all at once, and the gaps between when it did tell their own story. Northern Ireland was first, in 1921, under the Government of Ireland Act 1920, decades before any comparable body existed for Scotland or Wales. Scotland and Wales had to wait until September 1997, when referendums in both nations approved the creation of a Scottish Parliament and what was then a Welsh Assembly, with the London Assembly following in 1998; the bodies themselves were established between 1998 and 1999. The distance between 1921 and 1997 is not an accident of scheduling, it reflects three separate political histories arriving at devolution on three separate timelines. Even after 1997, the settlement kept moving: when Scottish voters rejected independence in the 2014 referendum, the response was not to freeze devolution where it stood but to extend it, and further powers moved to the Scottish Parliament under the Scotland Act 2016. Each stage was a fresh act of the Westminster Parliament, which is the point the whole timeline illustrates: every one of these transfers was a grant that could, in law, be given further, or in principle taken back, by the body that made it.