Thread by @Yascha_Mounk

A side note on the new British elections, the Fixed Term Parliament Act, and the difficulty of importing institutions that are supposed to work better into very different contexts.

[Short Thread.]

Britain traditionally allowed the Prime Minister to call new elections at will.

There was some evidence that this gave governments an incumbency advantage (since they could time reelection), led to political instability, and made policy implementation more difficult.

Hence...

...many reformers and political scientists advocated for the U.K. to adopt fixed parliamentary terms, like most other European countries.

The coalition government between Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, for reasons of its own, implemented this in the Fixed Parliament Act.

But though fixed terms may have advantages, they depend on how a country's other political institutions work, and what its norms are.

In Britain, voters have very little tolerance for coalition governments and assume that a government without a majority should go back to polls.

As a result, there has repeatedly been massive demand for new elections to solve various political crises over the past ten years.

Instead of elections becoming more rare as a result of the Act, as was expected, they have become much more frequent.

As British legal scholars might say, The Fixed Parliament Act has been honored more in the breach than in the observance.

The failed reform should make us more skeptical of importing "clever" institutions into very different political contexts.

[End of niche thread]