How do the concepts of democratic accountability and government stability complement and stand in tension with one another in the United Kingdom’s parliamentary system? How do these interactions affect parliamentarianism? In this report, Binendri Perera seeks to answer these questions by focusing on the year 2022 – within which the UK saw the resignations of two Prime Ministers – and draw upon comparative insights from Sri Lanka.
Sri Lanka is a semi-presidential system, an institutional regime type that provides weak mechanisms of accountability compared to parliamentary systems. In 2022, Sri Lanka saw its President compelled to resign from his position because of persistent public protests. In this report, Perera argues that even though the UK’s parliamentary mechanisms for holding the executive to account prevailed, the attempts by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his party allies to undermine institutional mechanisms posed and continue to pose a threat to the UK’s parliamentary model as well as the UK’s constitutional democracy.
This publication presents the personal views of the author and not those of The Constitution Society, which publishes it as a contribution to debate on this important subject.