I think this post aims at an important and true thing and misses in a subtle and interesting but important way.
Namely: I don’t think the important thing is that one faction gets a veto. I think it’s that you just need limitations on what the government can do that ensure that it isn’t too exploitative/extractive. One way of creating these kinds of limitations is creating lots of veto points and coming up with various ways to make sure that different factions hold the different veto points. But, as other commenters have noted, the UK government does not have structural checks and balances. In my understanding, what they have instead is a bizarrely, miraculously strong respect for precedent and consensus about what “is constitutional” despite (or maybe because of?) the lack of a written constitution. For the UK, and maybe other, less-established democracies (i.e. all of them), I’m tempted to attribute this to the “repeated game” nature of politics: when your democracy has been around long enough, you come to expect that you and the other faction will share power (roughly at 50-50 for median voter theorem reasons), so voices within your own faction start saying “well, hold on, we actually do want to keep the norms around.”
Also, re: the electoral college, can you say more about how this creates de facto vetos? The electoral college does not create checks and balances; you can win in the electoral college without appealing to all the big factions (indeed, see Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 win), and the electoral college puts no restraints on the behavior of the president afterward. It just noisily empowers states that happen to have factional mixes close to the national average, and indeed can create paths to victory that route through doubling down on support within your own faction while alienating those outside it (e.g. Trump’s 2016 and 2020 coalitions).
But, as other commenters have noted, the UK government does not have structural checks and balances. In my understanding, what they have instead is a bizarrely, miraculously strong respect for precedent and consensus about what “is constitutional” despite (or maybe because of?) the lack of a written constitution. For the UK, and maybe other, less-established democracies (i.e. all of them), I’m tempted to attribute this to the “repeated game” nature of politics: when your democracy has been around long enough, you come to expect that you and the other faction will share power (roughly at 50-50 for median voter theorem reasons), so voices within your own faction start saying “well, hold on, we actually do want to keep the norms around.”
The UK is also a small country, both literally, having a 4-5x smaller population than e.g. France during several centuries of Parliamentary rule before the Second Industrial Revolution, and figuratively, since they have an unusually concentrated elite that mostly goes to the same university and lives in London (whose metro area has 20% of the country’s population).
The “highly concentrated elite” issue seems like it makes it more, rather than less, surprising and noteworthy that a lack of structural checks and balances has resulted in a highly stable and (relatively) individual-rights-respecting set of policy outcomes. That is, it seems like there would thus be an especially strong case for various non-elite groups to have explicit veto power.
Do non-elite groups factor into OP’s analysis. I interpreted is as inter-elite veto, e.g. between the regional factions of the U.S. or between religious factions, and less about any “people who didn’t go to Oxbridge and don’t live in London”-type factions.
I can’t think of examples where a movement that wasn’t elite-led destabilized and successfully destroyed a regime, but I might be cheating in the way I define “elites” or “led.”
I think this post aims at an important and true thing and misses in a subtle and interesting but important way.
Namely: I don’t think the important thing is that one faction gets a veto. I think it’s that you just need limitations on what the government can do that ensure that it isn’t too exploitative/extractive. One way of creating these kinds of limitations is creating lots of veto points and coming up with various ways to make sure that different factions hold the different veto points. But, as other commenters have noted, the UK government does not have structural checks and balances. In my understanding, what they have instead is a bizarrely, miraculously strong respect for precedent and consensus about what “is constitutional” despite (or maybe because of?) the lack of a written constitution. For the UK, and maybe other, less-established democracies (i.e. all of them), I’m tempted to attribute this to the “repeated game” nature of politics: when your democracy has been around long enough, you come to expect that you and the other faction will share power (roughly at 50-50 for median voter theorem reasons), so voices within your own faction start saying “well, hold on, we actually do want to keep the norms around.”
Also, re: the electoral college, can you say more about how this creates de facto vetos? The electoral college does not create checks and balances; you can win in the electoral college without appealing to all the big factions (indeed, see Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 win), and the electoral college puts no restraints on the behavior of the president afterward. It just noisily empowers states that happen to have factional mixes close to the national average, and indeed can create paths to victory that route through doubling down on support within your own faction while alienating those outside it (e.g. Trump’s 2016 and 2020 coalitions).
The UK is also a small country, both literally, having a 4-5x smaller population than e.g. France during several centuries of Parliamentary rule before the Second Industrial Revolution, and figuratively, since they have an unusually concentrated elite that mostly goes to the same university and lives in London (whose metro area has 20% of the country’s population).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=dkhcNoMNHA0
The “highly concentrated elite” issue seems like it makes it more, rather than less, surprising and noteworthy that a lack of structural checks and balances has resulted in a highly stable and (relatively) individual-rights-respecting set of policy outcomes. That is, it seems like there would thus be an especially strong case for various non-elite groups to have explicit veto power.
Do non-elite groups factor into OP’s analysis. I interpreted is as inter-elite veto, e.g. between the regional factions of the U.S. or between religious factions, and less about any “people who didn’t go to Oxbridge and don’t live in London”-type factions.
I can’t think of examples where a movement that wasn’t elite-led destabilized and successfully destroyed a regime, but I might be cheating in the way I define “elites” or “led.”