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.”
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.”