Balancing Westminster-style Democratic Accountability with Institutional and Service-led Accountability in a Multi-level System: The Case of the Scottish Parliament

Like Westminster, the Scottish Parliament is part of an apparently simple accountability process: power is concentrated in the hands of ministers, who are accountable to the public through Parliament. As in Westminster, this simple picture of ministerial accountability is increasingly misleading. The Scottish Government plays an overarching role in policymaking but encourages institutional accountability: it sets a broad strategy and invites a large number of public bodies to share responsibility for its success. Ministers devolve most day-to-day policymaking to civil servants. The Scottish Government has moved from the production of short term targets to long term outcomes measures which go beyond the five-year terms of elected office. It encourages localism, respecting the competing mandate of elected local authorities and encouraging them to work with other public bodies through community planning partnerships. It encourages the ‘co-production’ of policy with service users. In that context, the Scottish Parliament struggles to perform an effective role, to identify the kinds of policy choices for which it can hold ministers directly responsible, or form a more direct relationship with public bodies. In other words, the Scottish Parliament is ill equipped to scrutinise ministers in a multi-level system, but these constraints relate as much to sub-central government as the complications of UK and EU responsibilities in which Scottish ministers can only be held accountable for a limited range of policy outcomes.