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Within the context of the devolution process in England, Cornwall and the North-East stand out in contrasting comparison. The North-East was given the opportunity to vote for a regional assembly, which it rejected in 2004, while the strong popular movement for an assembly in Cornwall was ignored by central government.This is reflected in the literature on the English question and regionalism in the UK, which focuses on the example of the North-East, and largely overlooks the grassroots support in Cornwall and the opportunities for understanding regionalism that this could provide. In this article, we explore why this might be the case, developing a comparison between the two areas in the context of the campaigns for setting up directly elected assemblies.We look at the territorial status of the two areas, how the respective campaigns were organised, the types of group involved, the motives that were driving activists, and each region's political significance to Labour. We find central control of the political agenda to be a key issue behind the failure of English regionalism.The process of devolution in the UK has an asymmetrical nature, and while Scotland and Wales have been granted forms of political devolution, England still remains the gaping hole in the settlement (Hazell, 2006).The English devolution project begun by New Labour in 1997 aimed at addressing such a vacuum. However, the plan has now effectively been killed off with the coalition government planning to dismantle not only the Regional Development Agencies but also the Government Offices of the Regions. Yet the fate of English devolution could have been different if the first referendum for an elected level of regional government had passed successfully. Instead, in 2004, the people of the North-East region of England rejected having an elected regional assembly and, in so doing, initiated the chain of events that would see the demise of this latest round in the programme of English regional devolution. However, in 2001, the people of Cornwall launched a popular petition asking Westminster to grant an assembly to an area that was administratively a county of England. In spite of this, the desire for devolution in Cornwall has been widely overlooked both by policy makers and academic literature. In this article we look at the territorial status of the two areas, and compare and contrast the assembly campaigns in the North-East and Cornwall to try and understand why emphasis was placed on a region that would come to reject the option, meaning that further devolved governance in Britain would leave the agenda for the foreseeable future. Such analysis challenges the stream of academic literature that considers England to be a homogeneous unit.We use'identity'in this context to indicate ideas that have resonance with how people popularly understand and situate themselves.In the first part, we find that most of the literature on English devolution focuses on the North-East, overlooking the strong movement for devolved governance in Cornwall.This bs_bs_b...

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This is a repository copy of Citizen participation and changing governance: cases of devolution in England.

Referendums on regional autonomy are rare events in European politics but are likely to produce important political and institutional effects. This article provides the first systematic account of the autonomy referendums held in October 2017 in Lombardy and Veneto (Italy), and seeks to: i) explore the origins of autonomy referendums, placing them within a wider comparative framework of similar exercises across Western European countries; ii) explain their political, economic, social and cultural roots; iii) analyze the campaigns and the results, assessing variations across and within the two regions; iv) reflect on the political and institutional implications of the referendums, and evaluate the extent to which they could lead to a new era of regionalism in Italy, characterized by further asymmetries and fragmentation both at political and institutional level. Far from being an isolated case, Italy can provide useful insights into the new politics of regionalism and federalism in Western Europe. We also suggest that a more nuanced approach to the study of regionalism should not only focus on regional-central relations but should also account for tensions existing within regions (e.g. regional vs. local levels and cities vs. provinces).