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Chapter one: The starting point, understanding the political system
- Democratic Backsliding
Freedom House is a modern way of comparatively measuring democracy across the world. Its multidimensional approach reflects the complexity of conceptualising democracy.
This is useful when thinking about the Westminster model. As proposed by democratic scholar Runciman (2018), some argue that the British system now shows backsliding, whereby the democratic practices that guided political systems in the past have eroded. Given the increasing political turbulence, voters may be less likely to get the electoral outcomes they were expecting. This undermines the punish-reward model.
- The nature of constitutions
Constitute presents a dataset comprised of the characteristics of historical constitutions. Academic scholars at the Comparative Constitutions Project have created a set of indices that describe the nature of the world’s constitutions.
This is useful when thinking globally and placing Britain in a comparative setting. Seeing the nature of other countries constitutions can help analyse the strengths and weakness of Britain’s uncodified constitution. For example, seeing how a clear separation of powers effects how a country functions.
https://www.constituteproject.org/
- Overview of Party stability
The party systems and governments observatory presents a database detailing the composition of governments from cabinet to ministerial members. It also monitors the stability of party systems in 48 European democratic states including the UK.
This is useful to familiarise yourself with key actors in Parliament, which ties into the principal-agent model, which helps us analyse the nature of the relationships between these key actors. As well as familiarising yourself with MPs, cabinet members and ministers, the database also measures Party stability over time. This is relevant given the uprise in turbulence described at the start of the book.