While we are looking forward to the first Democratic Debates later this month, the “official” start of the 2020 nomination process — which will not end until 13 months later at the Democratic National Convention — the United Kingdom is looking at a rather different process for choosing its next prime minister.  Technically, the United Kingdom does not have elections for prime minister.  Instead, the United Kingdom (and most western democracies) have elections for party leadership.  The prime minister is technically chosen by the Queen (or, in many other commonwealth countries, by the Governor-General — the official representative of the Queen for that country — or in other monarchies by that country’s king or queen or republics, like Germany, Israel, Greece, and Italy, by the president).  However, the tradition is that the leader of the majority party is selected as prime minister or — if no party individually has a majority — the person chosen as prime minister by the coalition that has a majority or — if no party or coalition has a majority — by the leader of the largest grouping in the legislature.

Those elections for party leadership can occur at any time.  Often, an election will occur shortly after a general election with the losing parties looking for new leadership for the next election.  However, in the middle of parliament, even the winning party can look at the tea leaves for the next election and decide that the best strategy for winning the next election is to kick out the person who seems to be leading the party to sure defeat. 

One of the things that makes the United Kingdom (or Canada or Australia) interesting is that in a paraphrase of the old saw, we are two countries united by a shared but diverging history.  At the time of the American Revolution, the United Kingdom was in the middle of a long evolution from a strong monarchy with a parliamentary check in the 1500s to the supremacy of the House of Commons by 1850.  And, in the 1770, there were flaws in the selection and composition of the House of Commons.  Coming from that shared point, the United States and the commonwealth countries have taken entirely different approaches to selecting a party leader. Continue Reading...