Prime Ministerialisation and Presidential Analogies: A Certain Difference in Interpretive Evolution

Abstract

Keith Dowding's article (Dowding, 2013) offers a concerted counter argument to the various depictions of the British prime minister that are allegedly dependent upon an inappropriate usage of presidential categories of analysis and interpretation. In many respects, the piece is a tightly composed and carefully controlled exposition on the various objections to this particular type of analysis that depends upon the usage of comparative points of reference. The clarity and direction of the presented case along with the deployment of evidentiary trails in support of the adopted strategic objective has much to commend it. To that extent, and in the light of its own purposive properties, it ranks as a thoroughly consistent exercise of sustained argumentation. The essence of the piece is one of asserting a case of mistaken identity. Whether it is a matter of unconscious reflexive intuition, or a form of deliberate misinformation, or simply a labile reliance upon superficial registers of comparability, the charge is that those who engage in presidential terminologies and points of reference when seeking to negotiate their way through the complex matrices of prime ministerial change are not merely wrong to do so but actively distract attention from a preferred and arguably optimum model of comprehension. The analytical modus operandi is that of reviving or renewing a clear demarcation between the political and institutional position of the UK prime minister on the one hand, and the political and institutional position of the US presidency on the other. For the purposes of the argument, the US presidency is the comparator of first resort not least because it is taken to be the primary source of a false analogy and also because it carries immediate traction as an apparently divergent and even alien structure.