Sub-national legislatures can lead prohibition while national governments lag, creating policy diffusion pressure.

Evidence

The Welsh Parliament passed this Act in January 2020, with Royal Assent following in March 2020, making Wales the second part of the United Kingdom to enact comprehensive prohibition — eighteen months after Scotland. The Act removes the reasonable chastisement defense from Welsh law in all settings. England remains the only part of the UK that retains the defense. The significance of the Scotland-Wales sequence for comparative policy analysis is substantial: two sub-national legislatures within a devolved UK system enacted comprehensive prohibition within eighteen months of each other, while the UK national government declined to introduce prohibition legislation for England, demonstrating that in federated or devolved political systems, sub-national first-movers can create political pressure on national governments through demonstration effects. — , The Rod and the Child, 8083

Categorization

• SEED: The England-as-last-holdout angle and the devolved-first-mover dynamic could drive an essay on how federated systems enable policy experimentation that national governments resist.
• XREF: connects to: Lawmaking is fragmented across many levels of government beyond just legislatures. — Lawrence M. Friedman and Grant M. Hayden, American Law: An Introduction, 441