Cabinet ministers in the UK’s post-2019 parliament have lasted in their jobs for an average of just eight months, a report comparing political stability across 17 countries has found, with Westminster also faring badly on a series of other metrics. The study, Strong and Stable, which looked at 10 aspects of parliamentary and governmental stability in countries using various electoral systems over the past 50 years, concluded that proportional voting did not mean more volatility compared with UK-style systems, and often the contrary. Perhaps the starkest measure for British politics was the length of tenure for cabinet ministers. Over the 1974-2023 period of the research, the UK average of 2.1 years was the fourth-worst of all the countries, ahead of just Australia (two years), France (1.8) and Italy (1.6). At the top of the table, the average period in office for a Swiss minister was 6.4 years, and 5.7 years for those in Luxembourg, according to the report, produced for Make Votes Matter, which campaigns for proportional representation. The longest average cabinet tenure in any UK parliament over the 50-year period, the 2.8 years seen from 1997-2001, was still less than the lowest such number for Germany, the 3.1 years seen in 1994-98.
This effect was exacerbated in recent ministerial tenures, with the average UK ministerial term since the 2019 election being eight months, described in the report as “not something anybody could defend as strong or stable government”. Part of that period was, of course, the very brief government of Liz Truss. The report found that, while the average prime ministerial term of office in the UK was roughly average at 4.8 years, Truss holds the record among all 17 countries since 1974 for the shortest term, at 49 days, ahead of Alexander Schallenberg, who lasted 56 days as Austria’s chancellor in 2021. On the wider measure of whole-cabinet durability, the UK is also near the bottom of the list, if still above Belgium, Ireland and Italy, with British cabinets reaching an average of 60% of their maximum duration. More generally, the report, which compared 50 years of politics in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK, found no evidence that the UK’s first-past-the-post voting system (FPTP) brings the stability argued by its proponents. One such metric was the number of early elections over the 50 years, with Canada and the UK, neither of which use proportional representation, completing just 69% and 76% of full parliamentary terms, while a series of PR-using democracies such as Finland, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland were at or near 100% – although, as the study notes, Norway does not even have a constitutional mechanism to call early elections.
Similarly, the study found, examination of electoral and ideological volatility – the net changes in both seat composition and the ideological differences within that – found that PR-based systems did not seem to produce more flux than non-PR ones. Alberto Smith, from Make Votes Matter, said: “Swapping secretaries of state every eight months isn’t strong or stable; it’s chaotic. Worse, it’s not a statistical anomaly – the UK’s instability in recent years is just the latest low point of a long-term downward trend. “FPTP in the UK leads to frequent, often quite drastic changes in policy direction – this wastes both time and money. By contrast, in countries that use PR, the necessity to build cross-party consensus on major issues means governments, backed by a majority of the public’s votes, can take a more long-term approach to policy-making.”