ABSTRACT
“England,” declared 19th Century reformer John Bright, “is the mother of parliaments.” In fact, England is the mother of a particular form of parliamentary democracy, known commonly as the Westminster Model, varieties of which have been adopted in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and many former British colonies throughout Africa and Asia. The defining characteristics of the Westminster model are that it is a party system, it has majoritarian and disproportional (first-past-the-post) national elections, and it concentrates executive power in one-party cabinets headed by a prime minister, traditionally conceived as primus inter pares (Lijphart, 1999). These features distinguish the U.K. from presidential systems, such as the U.S., and from many countries in the European Union that exercise forms of proportional representation (PR).
