The Westminster System of Government

The Westminster system — parliamentary sovereignty, responsible cabinet government, an elected lower house, an official opposition, and (in most cases) a constitutional monarch — is, by some distance, the most widely imitated constitutional arrangement in the contemporary period. Variants of it are used in more than fifty countries. The argument of this article is that the Westminster model is the British Empire’s most successful political export, that the export was consequential in ways that the architects of the model in the 1830s and 1840s did not intend, and that the question of whether the export is, on balance, a good or a bad thing is the most hotly contested in the modern historiography of the empire. The constitutionalist K. C. Wheare, in Modern Constitutions (1951), was the first to treat the model as a single category; the present generation of historians, of whom the work of the legal scholar Cheryl Saunders is the most distinguished example, has been more sceptical of the coherence of the category.

The English Origins

The Westminster model is, in the first instance, the political system that emerged in England between the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89 and the mid-nineteenth century. The Triennial Act of 1641, the Habeas Corpus Act 1679, the Bill of Rights of 1689, the Act of Settlement of 1701, the Septennial Act of 1716, and the gradual extension of the franchise through the Great Reform Act of 1832, the Second Reform Act of 1867, and the Third Reform Act of 1884 — these are the milestones. By 1900, the United Kingdom was a parliamentary monarchy with a substantial elected element, an established two-party system, and a recognised official opposition. Wheare called this configuration “the classic Westminster model.”

The most important feature of the Westminster model, as it had emerged by 1900, was the principle of parliamentary sovereignty — the principle, as A. V. Dicey put it in The Law of the Constitution (1885), that Parliament “has, under the English constitution, the right to make or unmake any law whatever; and, further, that no person or body is recognised by the law of England as having a right to override or set aside the legislation of Parliament.” This principle, which was the cornerstone of the English constitutional tradition, was the cornerstone of the Westminster model as it was exported to the colonies.

The Export to the Settler Dominions

The Westminster model was first exported to the settler dominions — the Canadian provinces, the Australian colonies, the New Zealand settlement, and the South African colonies. The process was neither uniform nor uncontested. In Nova Scotia, responsible government was conceded in 1848, on the initiative of the Whig politician Lord Grey, the colonial secretary, and against the wishes of the local conservative establishment. In the Province of Canada, responsible government was conceded in 1849, after the mounting political crisis of the 1840s. In New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland, and New Zealand, responsible government was conceded in the 1850s, on a more or less uniform pattern. In the Cape Colony, responsible government was conceded in 1872; in Natal, in 1893. The concession was, in each case, the result of local agitation, not metropolitan benevolence — a fact that the older “imperial gift” historiography of the mid-twentieth century often obscured. The historian John Darwin, in The Empire Project (2009), has argued that the export of the Westminster model to the settler dominions was the most successful example of British imperial state-building in the nineteenth century.

The Westminster model in the settler dominions was, in many respects, a more thoroughgoing constitutional arrangement than the Westminster model in Britain. The Australian Constitution of 1901, the New Zealand Constitution Act of 1852 (as amended), and the South Africa Act of 1909 all created written constitutions, with elaborate provisions for federalism (in Australia), parliamentary sovereignty (in New Zealand), and the protection of minority rights (in South Africa). The Canadian Confederation of 1867 was, in many respects, the most ambitious of the early Westminster-model constitutions, and the British North America Act 1867 was, for much of the twentieth century, the model of a successful federal Westminster-model constitution.

The Export to India

The export of the Westminster model to India was a much more complicated matter. The Indian Councils Acts of 1861, 1892, and 1909 introduced elected elements into the Viceroy’s and the provincial governors’ councils, but the franchise was narrow and the elected members were a minority. The Government of India Act 1919 introduced the principle of “dyarchy” — a system in which some subjects were transferred to elected Indian ministers, while others remained in the hands of the Governor and his executive council. The Government of India Act 1935 went much further: it established provincial autonomy, with elected Indian ministers responsible to elected Indian legislatures, and provided for the eventual federation of British India and the Indian princely states. The federation was, in the event, never implemented; the provincial autonomy was, however, fully implemented after the elections of 1937, and it provided the institutional framework of the early Indian National Congress governments.

The Constitution of independent India in 1950 retained the Westminster framework — a parliamentary system, a ceremonial head of state, an official opposition, an auditor-general — but rejected the monarch and added a written constitution, a supreme court with the power of constitutional review, and a bill of rights. The result was a hybrid: a Westminster-style parliamentary system in a federal, written-constitution, bill-of-rights framework. The Indian Constitution has been, since 1950, the most imitated constitutional document in the post-colonial era, and the Indian model has been a major influence on the constitutional development of Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore, and many other post-colonial states. The legal scholar Granville Austin, in The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation (1999), has argued that the Indian Constitution was the most ambitious constitutional experiment of the twentieth century.

The Export to Africa

The export of the Westminster model to Africa was the most ambitious and the most contested. The Gold Coast (Ghana) was the first British African colony to receive a Westminster-style constitution, in the 1946 Burns Constitution; the 1951 Lyttelton Constitution prepared the way for independence in 1957. The Nigerian constitutions of 1954 and 1960, the Kenya Constitution of 1963, the Uganda Constitution of 1962, the Tanzania Constitution of 1965, the Zambia Constitution of 1964, the Malawi Constitution of 1964, the Zimbabwe Constitution of 1965, and the South Africa Constitution of 1996 were all, in their different ways, Westminster-style constitutions. The Ghanaian, Nigerian, Kenyan, Ugandan, Tanzanian, Zambian, and Malawian constitutions have all been amended, suspended, or replaced since independence — a fact that has given rise to a substantial body of scholarship on the “Westminster-model failure” in Africa.

The most ambitious Westminster-model export in Africa is the South African Constitution of 1996, drafted under the post-apartheid settlement. The 1996 Constitution retained the Westminster-style features of the 1961 Constitution (a parliamentary system, a ceremonial head of state, an auditor-general) but added a written constitution, a supreme court with the power of constitutional review, a bill of rights, and a substantial body of independent constitutional commissions. The 1996 Constitution is now widely regarded as the most successful Westminster-style constitution in the post-colonial period, and it has been a major influence on the constitutional development of many other African states. The political scientist Arend Lijphart, in Patterns of Democracy (1999), treated the South African Constitution as a model of what a “consensus” democracy could achieve in a deeply divided society.

The Westminster Model in the Caribbean

The Westminster model has had a particularly durable presence in the Caribbean. Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, and the smaller British territories all retain Westminster-style constitutions; Jamaica and the Bahamas continue to have the British monarch as head of state, and Barbados became a republic in 2021. The West Indies Act 1967, which made the short-lived West Indies Federation possible, was the most ambitious attempt to apply the Westminster model at a regional level; the federation collapsed in 1962, largely for want of a popular mandate. The Caribbean Court of Justice, established in 2005, is the regional successor to the Privy Council, and its judgments are, in the main, written in the Westminster-style tradition.

The Contemporary Debate

The contemporary debate over the Westminster inheritance is one of the most heated in the field of comparative constitutional law. Lijphart distinguished between “Westminster” and “consensus” models of democracy, and argued that the Westminster model, with its majoritarian electoral system, its fusion of executive and legislature, and its concentration of power in the cabinet, is poorly suited to deeply divided societies. The political scientist Robert Dahl, in Polyarchy (1971), took a more favourable view, treating the Westminster model as evidence of a broad, slow transition to representative government. The empirical evidence is mixed, and the historiographical argument is correspondingly more energetic. The legal scholar Cheryl Saunders, in The Constitution of Australia: A Contextual Analysis (2011), has argued that the Westminster model has been a more flexible instrument than its critics have allowed, and that the present generation of Westminster-model states has, on the whole, adapted the model to local circumstances with substantial success. The argument is not yet settled.

Historiographical Note

The standard accounts of the Westminster model in the empire are Wheare’s Modern Constitutions (1951), H. F. Mansergh’s The Commonwealth Experience (1969), and Nicholas Mansergh’s The Imperial Idea and its Enemies (1969). The more recent literature is dominated by the Cambridge School — the works of C. A. Bayly, W. J. Mommsen, and David Washbrook — and by the post-colonial literature represented by S. N. Sangwan and Mark Harrison. The unresolved question in the field is whether the Westminster model is best understood as a set of political institutions that can be judged on their merits, or as a cultural inheritance that can be judged only in the context of the imperial system that produced it. The present generation of historians has, on the whole, favoured the second reading. The most recent work, of which the legal scholar Cheryl Saunders, the political scientist Arend Lijphart, and the constitutional theorist Richard Stacey are the most distinguished representatives, has been more nuanced: the model was an export that worked in some places and not in others, and the explanation of the variation is one of the most promising research questions in the field.

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