Abstract
A democratic political system requires a means for the public to influence the decisions of political leaders. This influence may be exercised only intermittently, as during elections, but in most democratic systems it is exercised almost constantly through mechanisms such as political parties, through interest groups, and increasingly through public opinion polls and the media. The government of the United Kingdom is no different. While some pundits have said that the United Kingdom is a democracy only once every five years (the statutory maximum term for a sitting Parliament), in fact the day-to-day decisions of British government are influenced by popular demands and pressures.
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Notes
Peter Hennessy and Anthony Seldon, eds., Ruling Performance: British Governments from Attlee to Thatcher (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987).
David Denver, “The Centre,” in Anthony King et al., Britain at the Polls, 1992 (Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House, 1993).
Colin Brown and Patricia Wynn Davis, “Major Gives a Pledge to Listen,” The Independent, 13 May 1995.
The term “Old Tories” comes from Samuel H. Beer, British Politics in a Collectivist Era (New York: Knopf, 1965); for a very useful discussion of the contemporary Conservative Party, see Paul Whiteley, Jeremy J. Richardson, and Patrick Seyd, True Blues: The Politics of Conservative Party Membership (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).
For example, the achievement for which Harold Macmillan was perhaps proudest was his role as minister of housing in building thousands of new council houses, many of which were later sold off by the Thatcherites.
These figures are estimates; no definitive figures exist for Conservative Party membership.
Nyta Mann, “Blair Set for Clause Four Victory,” New Statesman and Society 8 (10 March 1995): 7–8.
Patricia Wynn Davies, “Labour to Impose All-Women Shortlists,” The Independent, 27 September 1995.
See J. Mohan, The Political Geography of Contemporary Britain (London: Macmillan, 1989).
Mark N. Franklin, The Decline of Class Voting in Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985); Anthony Heath et al., Understanding Political Change: Britain Votes 1964–87 (Oxford: Pergamon, 1988); Ivor Crewe, “Labor Force Changes, Working Class Decline and the Labour Vote,” in Labor Parties in Post-industrial Societies, ed. Frances Fox Piven (Oxford: Polity Press, 1991).
Patrick Dunleavy, “The Urban Basis of Political Alignment: Social Class, Domestic Property Ownership and State Intervention in Consumption Processes,” British Journal of Political Science 9 (1979): 409–44.
In the south of England unemployment appears more important as a predictor of voting than does the nominal occupation of an individual.
There is some evidence that voters tend to behave somewhat more conservatively as they age, so these data do not mean that the same patterns necessarily will persist.
Richard Rose, Do Parties Make a Difference? (Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House, 1980), 39.
Richard Rose, Politics in England, 5th ed. (Glenview, 111.: Scott, Foresman, 1989), 262.
Rose, Do Parties Make a Difference?
Ivor Crewe, “The Policy Agenda: A New Thatcherite Consensus?” Contemporary Record 3 (1990): 2–7.
Some scholars argue that groups are in many ways more central to policy than are parties. See Jeremy Richardson and A. Grant Jordan, Government under Pressure (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1979). For a critique of British pluralism, see Samuel H. Beer, Britain Against Itself (London: Faber, 1982).
This experiment with corporatism has been abolished, in part because of Mrs. Thatcher’s aversion to programs of this type.
David Marsh and R.A.W. Rhodes, Policy Networks in British Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
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© 1998 Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Hancock, M.D., Conradt, D.P., Peters, B.G., Safran, W., Zariski, R. (1998). Who Has the Power and How Did They Get It?. In: Politics in Western Europe. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-14555-3_3
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