The United Kingdom has a new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham. The process for replacing the previous PM, Kier Starmer, with Burnham is instructive when set in contrast with the American system. But first a little theory (no math).
Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem
Kenneth Arrow won a Nobel Prize in 1972 for demonstrating the impossibility of any voting system perfectly representing the preferences of a group of people who do not already agree. For example, say you have three people who want to order pizza. One loves sausage, the second loves olives, and the third anchovies. Imagine, as hard as it is to believe, that the first one won’t eat anchovies, the second is a vegetarian, and the third is allergic to olives. There is no way to get an order that will not exclude one of the people from eating the pizza. Hence the word “impossible.”
Arrow’s theorem goes into a lot more detail (and no pizza examples) about the impossibility of coming up with a ranked order of preferences and explores all types of voting options, including proportional representation and single transferable votes. (These are rather complicated voting systems used in some localities to improve upon our “first past the post” system. As Arrow predicted, they simply produce a different result, not an objectively better one.) He has a lot of math to demonstrate all of this if you are interested.
I wanted to lay down the mathematical impossibility of a perfect voting system before comparing the two systems so you can just accept that these are “as good as we can get” attempts to run a representative system of government.
UK Parties
In the United Kingdom and other parliamentary systems, the parties are private organizations that run their own memberships and nominating processes. When they need to nominate a candidate for any position, the members of the party meet in person at a convention and vote to put that person forward for the election. Simple enough.
Andy Burnham was an MP for several years before stepping down and becoming mayor of Manchester, England’s second city. By most accounts he did a pretty good job. He was given the popular title of “King of the North” for his efforts to get money from Parliament for his region.
The most recent PM, Kier Starmer, won a resounding majority in Parliament in 2024 with 411 Labour seats to the Conservative’s 121 and 72 for the Liberal Democrats. But his popularity plummeted. He resigned as of Monday.
In anticipation of this resignation, Burnham ran in a safe seat by-election. This means a sitting member of parliament stepped down so he could run in a riding (what Americans call a district) that would certainly vote Labour. Back in Parliament for only about a month, Starmer stepped down and Burnham ran for the premiership. But in this case only the Labour MPs voted for him, not members of the party and not the general public. This is not controversial in the UK or any other parliamentary democracy.
US Parties
American parties, despite what some might think, are far more integrated into the governments and political systems of the states and the nation. For instance, most states require that when you register to vote you must choose a party. There are several reasons for this, but the most important one for this post is that state governments organize the party nominating process.
Take the example of Maine (please!). Maine will elect a US Senator in November. The sitting US Senator, Susan Collins, was a shoe-in for the Republican ticket, so let’s just look at the Democrats. Several people ran for the nomination in the Democratic party. But this means little more than getting a sufficient number of signatures from voters. The party has little to no control over who runs for the nomination of the party.
And so Graham Platner, he of the Nazi tattoo, ran and won the Democratic primary on July 9 with 72% of the vote. That is a landslide. A lot of the party grandees were wary of him and really didn’t want him to run, but since 2024 Maine has had a semi-open primary system. This means that, not only can anyone run for any party if they get enough signatures, almost anyone in the state can vote in the primary. A “closed” primary restricts the voting to those who have registered to vote as a member of that party. A “semi-open” system also allows those who registered as Independent. So all Democrat party members and anyone who wasn’t a Republican could vote in the primary.
Well, Platner resigned after a series of (even more) scandals were reported. But this was after he won the primary election. What to do? The state of Maine could not organize and pay for another state-wide election. The money isn’t in the budget. So the Maine Democratic party is holding a convention as I type this to choose their candidate for senator. Troy Jackson is almost guaranteed to be nominated at the convention today.
Having a convention choose a candidate is now so unusual in the US that this process is highly controversial and (mainly Republicans) are suggesting that the results are illegitimate or undemocratic. (This is where I refer you back to the top and Arrow’s Theorem.)
US National Primaries
Last night the national Democratic Party decided on the schedule for its presidential primary elections for 2028. The whole country does not vote in primaries on the same day. There is a rolling schedule determined by the party. This is very important because winning one or more states right at the beginning gives a candidate momentum, which is very important for raising funds and proceeding on to the next state or states.
New Hampshire has been the first state primary for decades. (Iowa has caucuses, but I won’t go into that now.) The idea was that the population was small enough that candidates really had to engage with the people, which has largely been true. Recently, however, Democratic constituencies have complained that New Hampshire is demographically very unlike the party. Specifically, New Hampshire is more white that the party at large.
South Carolina has often been the second state primary for the Democrats and last night was moved ahead to the first slot. South Carolina is far more black than New Hampshire, which pleased the African American part of the Democratic coalition. But the other contender was Nevada, which is highly Hispanic. The Hispanic coalition, reportedly, is not happy with this.
Beyond racial coalition issues, the order of states is important for the type of candidate the party will choose. Far left candidates have surged in Democratic primaries, capturing the nomination for mayor of New York (and winning) and leading in the Michigan US Senate primary. Notably, black voters do not like these candidates, by and large. So putting a heavily black state up front is an effort by the party elite to get some control over who will run under their name. At this point it’s all they have.
But wait! New Hampshire law says it must be the first state to vote in both primaries, so this decision by the party could be illegal. Again, this is only an issue because of the deep involvement of state governments in the selection process of candidates. It might turn out that New Hampshire law has more influence on when the primaries take place than do members of the parties, themselves.
The move to primaries over conventions was in part a result of the disastrous Chicago Democratic convention in 1968 that resulted in riots. The idea of making the process more “democratic” by allowing people to vote throughout the country has worked. People the party officials would never have allowed to run have run and won. Donald Trump was opposed by almost the entire Republican establishment. Zohran Mamdani did this in NYC. And Abdul El-Sayed is driving the Democratic establishment crazy in Michigan’s US Senate primary.
Arrow won that Nobel Prize in 1972, just as these parties thought they figured out a better way of organizing elections. The irony of history.