Political institutional differences, not economics, explain why Britain’s party system survived.

Evidence

Faced with the stability of political institutions in the British Isles and the simultaneous decline of all nation-states on the Continent, one can hardly avoid concluding that the difference between the Anglo-Saxon and the Continental party system must be an important factor. For the merely material differences between a greatly impoverished England and an un-destroyed France were not great after the close of this war; unemployment, the greatest revolutionizing factor in prewar Europe, had hit England even harder than many Continental countries; and the shock to which England’s political stability was being exposed right after the war through the Labor Government’s liquidation of imperialist government in India and its tentative efforts to rebuild an English world policy along nonimperialist lines must have been tremendous. Nor does mere difference in social structure account for the relative strength of Great Britain; for the economic basis of her social system has been severely changed by the socialist Government without any decisive change in political institutions. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 636

Categorization

• XREF: This institutional-structure-over-economics argument parallels the scaffolding interest in how bureaucratic rationality and institutions enable or resist mass exclusion. — connects to: British observers blamed parliamentarism, not Fascism, for Italy’s troubles — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 1370; British political confusion pushed liberalism into economics alone — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 394