ABSTRACT
This chapter presents United Kingdom profiles of longstanding democracies and of the European Union, and provides essential detail on history, electoral system, political parties and cleavages, and governments. The United Kingdom has at its core England, to which Wales was formally joined in 1536 and likewise Scotland in 1707; these three nations forming Great Britain. The United Kingdom joined the European Community in 1973, and the voters confirmed the country’s renegotiated membership after-the-fact in a referendum in 1975. The United Kingdom uses a straightforward single-member plurality electoral system. In the early 1980s the party was on the far left arguing for nuclear disarmament, more socialist economic policies, and the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Community. The Conservative Party is the United Kingdom’s oldest modern party, whose lineage some have dated back as far as the seventeenth century. From 1945 until 2010, governments in the United Kingdom were always single-party, either of the Conservatives or the Labour Party.
