Another change of guard in Downing Street has triggered a renewed bout of concern – and sniggers – over the fragility of British politics and its democracy. Not for the first time, as the country gets its seventh prime minister in 10 years. Four years ago, openDemocracy reported “Boris Johnson has quit, but Britain’s democracy is still broken.” This time, when Keir Starmer put in his papers paving the way for fellow Labour leader Andy Burnham to take over as prime minister, The Economist asked “Is British politics broken?”

In many ways, it is. Repeated leadership upheavals have caused persistent government dysfunction. It’s a sign of the growing transience of voters’ loyalties to parties, making politics inherently volatile. Support for Labour, which won a landslide just two years ago, ebbed, and Keir’s ratings as prime minister plummeted, forcing his hand.

The instability, now a chronic feature of British politics, undermines the prime minister’s authority, raising questions about the country’s governability and the quality of its democracy. Germany’s Der Spiegel compares Downing Street to a transit station. It’s a situation apparently bad enough for Russia’s state broadcaster RT to call – without any sense of irony at all – an “illusion of democracy”.

But is it really that bad? After all, when did stability become a marker of democratic quality? Undemocratic regimes are actually far better at providing stability because they eliminate the uncertainties that are part and parcel of competitive democracy.

Unlike authoritarian regimes, where outcomes are more predictable – leaving aside sudden ruptures such as coups and purges – because competition is constrained, uncertainty is intrinsic to democracy. In the formulation of the political theorist Adam Przeworski, democracy is in fact a system of “organised uncertainty”. Is it even a democracy if it is anchored in predictable........

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