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Taking place amid a global pandemic, the 2021 Senedd Election saw Welsh Labour returned as the largest party at the sixth consecutive occasion since the institution's founding in 1999. Results for opposition parties were mixed: the Conservatives achieved their highest ever vote share but their seat tally fell short of pre-election expectations, and Plaid Cymru again made little progress. Using data from the 2021 Welsh Election Study, we explore the election campaign and results, and offer a first analysis of vote choice. We find that Labour not only benefitted from incumbency advantages drawn from voters' approval of the Welsh Government's handling of the pandemic, but through its use of symbols, branding and messaging, the party continues to remain attuned to a national identity position that broadly aligns with that of the electorate as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Welsh Labour government occupies a unique position in UK territorial politics, favouring neither the status quo nor independence for Wales while advocating a new settlement for the whole state. This article provides a detailed examination of its policy, focusing on its position on the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty. Drawing from a range of documentary sources, we analyse the Welsh government's constitutional proposals and its decision-making in the wake of the 2016 referendum on European Union membership. We argue that Welsh policy is defined by ambiguity. While it advances an alternative constitutional vision, it refrains from rejecting Westminster's sovereignty outright. In the aftermath of the referendum, it sought to accommodate that sovereignty with its own constitutional claims through enhanced intergovernmental collaboration. In light of the Johnson administration's centralising reforms, the strategy appears to have failed. Caught in the fractious politics of the Union, Welsh constitutional policy now faces an uncertain future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the development of the Council of Social Service for Wales during what is often called the Golden Age of the Welfare State. Recovering the neglected history of the peak organisation for voluntary social service in Wales adds to our understanding of the histories of social policy and postwar Wales. The article addresses social policy from a doubly peripheral perspective – it attends to a territorial periphery of the UK State while voluntary action can be left at the margins of Welfare State analysis. From this perspective we hope to cast new light on the historiography of the 'British Welfare State' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Discursive institutionalism' provides a potentially fruitful means of overcoming the tendential structuralism of much new institutionalist scholarship. In particular, it focuses attention on the interplay of structure and agency and raises important questions about how far we should expect policy--and indeed the polity--to be coherent. Radaelli and Schmidt's drawing together of their discursive institutionalism with the tradition of policy analysis provides a valuable framework for 'bottom-up' analysis of the EU, and particularly of Europeanisation, and provides conceptual guidance for the careful empirical work required to make sense of these phenomena. Historical sociology, with its caution against 'the fallacy of retrospective determinism', provides additional elements for this conceptual framework. In particular, it helps us to interrogate 'general trends' or 'toaster discourses', rather than taking them for granted as wholly 'external' pressures on particular policy sectors., In 1984, Jacques Delors, a French 'social(ist) Christian', was appointed President of the European Commission. When his decade-long period as President ended, Europe had been transformed and was continuing to [...]

The consistent failure to match EU market integration with social policies provoked the development of new modes of European governance for welfare provision in the early 1990s. Based on policy co-ordination rather than integration, these new governance modes were consolidated as the 'Open Method of Co-ordination' (OMC) at the Lisbon Summit in 2000. This article analyses the scope and limits of the OMC, locating it in the context of broader trends and tendencies in governance and social provision. Indeed, the perceived 'success' of the OMC may reflect a deeper trend in social policy across western Europe and beyond, towards 'active' welfare policies. In many ways the OMC is consistent with the influential 'regulatory state' vision of the EU. Yet by 'activating' welfare the OMC may challenge market liberal theories of European economic regulation. The first seeks to integrate economic and social policies while the latter is premised on their separation.

The White Paper on European Governance can be seen as a bid to make a major contribution to the strategic leadership of the Union. By centring its deliberations and proposals on the concept of `governance', the Commission signalled an intention to explore the limits of conventional hierarchical law and policy, and propose alternatives. Yet the White Paper concludes that a renewed and reinvigorated `Community method' should be at the heart of EU policy-making, with the Commission itself playing an enhanced role. Moreover, the paper criticizes the Member States and `intergovernmental' institutions, rather than the Commission itself. These features are neither good politics nor a full response to the questions raised by the White Paper or set for it by Prodi. Enlargement and the increased importance of the issues of (re)distribution and related emergence of new modes of governance, such as the open method of co-ordination, pose challenges and provide opportunities for the Commission and the Union more generally. A White Paper that was both more modest and self-confident about the part to be played by the Commission might have made a more important intervention in current debate.

The Labour Party's social policies regarding children and parenting and improving the welfare states are examined. The author, arguing in support of stronger parent-child policies, maintains the Labour Party does not have a clear political strategy, even though the subject has received a great deal of attention from them.