The Prime Ministerialisation of the British Prime Minister

Abstract

The presidentialisation of the prime minister thesis should be expunged from political science vocabulary. To the extent that the forces identified by those who pursue the thesis exist, they do not make the British prime minister more like the US president. Quite the reverse: they enhance the different and already stronger powers of the prime minister. The prime ministers offices serve a different function from that of the White House. The roles of the prime minister and the president as leaders of their parties are entirely different. The personalisation of politics is an analytically separate process, and affects parliamentary and presidential systems alike. Media representation of prime ministers as ‘presidential’ is entirely superficial; political science needs to plunge deeper into the institutional forces of presidential and prime ministerial power. The institutions of presidential and parliamentary systems are so different that any global force acting upon them are as likely to drive them further apart as lead them to converge. Prime ministers are more powerful within their systems than presidents; strengthening their powers makes them less, not more, like presidents.