Making Accountability Work Under Asymmetric Devolution. the British Case

The majority of decentralising reforms in advanced democracies during the last decades have been asymmetric. Devolution à la UK has not been an exception in this general trend and it has resulted in one of the most heterogeneous institutional settings amongst European countries. This paper purports to analyse the extent to which the asymmetric fragmentation of powers across levels of government in the United Kingdom has an impact in the operation of electoral accountability. More specifically, it will investigate whether the existing cross-regional institutional variety in levels of devolution between Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and England results in cross-regional variation in clarity of responsibility and economic voting.