Understanding the Differing Political Performances of the Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru: A Statecraft Approach

Since the advent of devolution in 1999, there have been two growing categories of studies addressing the performance of the two most significant Stateless Nationalist & Regionalist Parties in Scotland and Wales: the Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru. Pre-existing SNRP literature has sought to explain SNRP performance by focusing on one aspect of SNRP elite’s decision-making such as ideological positioning (Massetti, 2011) or organisational reform (McAgnus, 2016). Alternatively, both comparative case study literature and specific literature on the electoral performance of the SNP and Plaid have either honed in on specific elections or have focused on the relationship between national identity and electoral performance since 1999. This thesis wishes to make a novel contribution to the literature by using Jim Bulpitt’s Statecraft as a theoretical framework to develop a more comprehensive understanding and systematic explanation of the SNP’s and Plaid’s differing electoral trajectories throughout the devolution period. While the theory is useful to our understanding of national politics in its emphasis on how structures provide opportunities for actors to demonstrate competence, the thesis presents a revised version of Statecraft to both theoretically and methodologically update Bulpitt’s framework but also to make it cognisant of the differing structures and practices of devolved politics. Using the revised ‘Sub-national Statecraft’, the thesis takes a comparative case study approach and uses a synthesis of methodological techniques in interviews, documentary analysis, and extensive secondary survey data to assess the decisions of both parties’ leaderships and public responses to them. The thesis finds that Sub-national Statecraft provides a comprehensive and systematic explanation of the SNP’s outperformance of Plaid. The thesis while acknowledging the saliency of Statecraft’s ‘functions’ relating to Party Management and Political Argument Hegemony, argues Governing Competence and in particular how effective each party has been in exploiting the multileveled structure of devolution to advance their own goals, appears to be the key difference in explaining their opposite political trajectories.