As the United States celebrates its independence on July 4, its former colonizer is holding national elections. The center-left Labour Party is favored to win after 14 years out of power, in an era when far-right movements have gained ground in the United States, Europe, Latin America and Asia.
Gary Gerstle, a U.S. historian who moved to England in 2014 to work at the University of Cambridge, spoke with Capital & Main about the differences in the way elections are held in Britain and the United States and what election results can tell us about the state of democracy worldwide. The British election, Gerstle said, is being watched by “authoritarians and democrats everywhere in the world” to see which side prevails, and that in the U.S., “a victory for Trump dramatically advances authoritarian rule.”
Ultimately, Gerstle said, restructuring economies to be more fair may be as important in the fight to invigorate democracy as electoral reform.
Gerstle is retiring this year from his position as an American history professor at Cambridge. He will spend next year at Harvard University writing his new book, Politics in Our Time: Authoritarian Peril and Democratic Hopes in the Twenty-First Century.
Capital & Main’s Kelly Candaele interviewed Gerstle in June at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.
This interview was edited for brevity and clarity.
Capital & Main: With the far right rising in the United States and many countries in Europe, what does it mean that the center-left Labour Party is favored to win the election in Great Britain?
Gary Gerstle: Autocracy is rising in many places in the world now. The far right is challenging the validity of democracy as a political system, seeking to invest more and more authority in the hands of a single individual or a small party and stripping away the independence of the judiciary. You have Trump in the United States, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Modi in India, Orban in Hungary, and Putin, of course, in Russia. And perhaps Le Pen and or her successor in France. This resembles the 1930s, where democracy was on the defensive everywhere. Given those circumstances, any victory for liberal small “d” democrats who hold clearly and consistently to an independent judiciary, the rule of law and the imperative of accepting election results — and thus the peaceful transition of power — is very important.
A victory for the Labour Party matters a great deal not just for democracy but for generating hope that a politics of the center-left can triumph over a politics of the right at the polls. Britain can’t carry the weight and influence that it once did. Still, in a world threatened by authoritarianism, every national election matters. A resurgence of social democracy in Britain may give hope to similar forces in Germany, France and the Netherlands.
“If Biden were a member of the Tory Party, a disastrous debate of the sort he experienced last week might already have caused his ouster.”
What are some key differences in elections and political structures in Britain and the United States?
I think the similarities matter more than the differences. Both are democracies and have legislatures that are sovereign. But there are important differences. In the British system, Parliament is the seat of power, and thus separation of powers that exists in the U.S. between the president and Congress doesn’t exist. The prime minister is chosen by the party and is elected as a regular member of Parliament. Because the prime minister is a product of the party, he or she is also more of a creature of the party. An outsider with little experience in politics crashing a national election — a regular feature of American elections — is much less common in Britain.
The parties in the U.K. are more disciplined than in the United States. Every party runs with a manifesto, and that manifesto, if they are victorious, is expected to guide the party in power for the succeeding five years. By the same token, parties in the U.K. have more tools at their disposal to remove an unpopular party leader. If Biden were a member of the Tory Party, a disastrous debate of the sort he experienced last week might already have caused his ouster.
And they don’t have a Senate that can filibuster legislation.
The House of Lords has very restricted powers nowhere near the power of the U.S. Senate. Another important divergence is the cost of elections. Elections in the U.K. last weeks, while U.S. presidential campaigns go on for years. The amount of money spent on parliamentary campaigns is a drop in the bucket compared to the hundreds of millions of dollars spent in the United States to elect a president.
Keir Starmer for Labour and Rishi Sunak for the Conservatives campaign throughout the country in Scotland, Wales and across England. Our presidential candidates go to fewer states because of the nature of the Electoral College.
There is no electoral college in the U.K., but there is also no proportional representation as is the case in many European countries. Proportional representation means that a party’s share of the national legislature will correspond roughly to its share of the total popular vote. The U.K. instead uses a “first past the post” system, similar to the “winner take all” system in the U.S. Candidates run in local constituencies as they do in the district contests for the House of Representatives. If each of 100 constituencies in the U.K. votes for the same party by a 51-49 percent margin, that party gets 100 seats and the losing party gets nothing, despite its high vote totals. In that respect, the electoral systems of the U.S. and the U.K. resemble each other.
Such a system makes it very difficult to launch and sustain third, fourth and fifth parties; those who vote for such parties are likely to have representation in Parliament far less than their overall share of the popular vote might merit. There is dissatisfaction with this system in Britain similar to the dissatisfaction with the Electoral College in the U.S. In both cases, many wish for the overall popular vote to be fully determinative of representation. In both countries, the prevailing rules governing running elections are very hard to change.
“Maybe we have to start by reconstructing the economic system and giving more and more people in this society a belief that they can build a good and secure life for themselves and their children.”
The U.S. and Britain seem to have tracked each other politically through the decades.
If you think about Britain in relation to America, at every key moment of the neoliberal order’s rise and fall in America, there was a parallel political and economic dynamic at work in Britain. The neoliberal prime minister that paralleled Reagan was Margaret Thatcher. She wanted to release society from the grip of what she considered a tyrannical state. Later in the United Kingdom, Tony Blair played a role similar to Bill Clinton, getting “New Labour” to acquiesce to the prerogatives of neoliberal, or market, ideology. And then Brexit erupted almost at the same exact moment as Donald Trump, both expressions of anger at what the neoliberal order had wrought.
These were paired phenomena — Thatcher/Reagan, Blair/Clinton and Brexit/Trump. There are fears here that Starmer will be a repeat of Blair and that he will acquiesce to market ideology much too easily. But I think such a judgment about Starmer is premature. Rachel Reeves, Starmer’s key economic adviser, has been very interested in what the Biden administration has been doing in the United States in terms of reorienting the relationship between government and capitalist economic markets. The goal of a new Labour government may be similar to Biden’s goal in the U.S.: to shape market outcomes in a way that allows the growth and wealth that a capitalist system can generate to be shared with the many, and not just concentrated in the hands of the few.
How can the current weakness of democratic politics be overcome?
So many democratic systems in the world are having difficulty delivering results that voters feel content with. That frustration with democracy is so widespread may suggest that the problem lies less with this or that country’s imperfect electoral system and more with the imbalance between private economic power on the one hand and the ability of government to regulate that economic power in the public interest on the other.
Maybe we have to start by reconstructing the economic system and giving more and more people in this society a belief that they can build a good and secure life for themselves and their children. There have been moments in American history when the country’s very imperfect electoral system worked pretty well. With the right kind of political economy, perhaps it can be made to work again.
