Quality of Scottish democracy

Abstract

The founders of Scottish devolution intended to create a ‘new politics’ that would be less adversarial than British politics. Some of their aspirations resonate with the basic themes of freedom, equality and democratic control in the quality of democracy literature dating back to the 1970s. Authors of this literature disagree on some aspects of what constitutes democratic quality, so a distinction can be made between minimalist and maximalist democratic conceptualisations. This chapter provides examples of both types of conceptualisation present before and after devolution, noting that more recent developments are pushing Scotland in the highly contested maximalist direction