How does the UK Prime Minister just get booted from office? It appears much harder to be booted from office in the U.S.
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In Britain, the executive and legislative branches of government are kind of fused into one. The Prime Minister (who is the head of government) is a member of Parliament (the legislature) and can only stay in office so long as they maintain the support of a majority of its members; in other words, the Prime Minister and her Government must always have the ‘confidence’ of Parliament. As of right now, Theresa May is the PM because her Conservative party plus the support of a small regional party from Northern Ireland (the DUP) is enough for a majority.
If, however, she can no longer form a majority, she cannot stay in office. This could happen a few ways:
– there could be a formal “vote of no confidence” in which a majority of MPs vote against her in Parliament; this could cause a new election
– MPs from her own party could decide on their own that they need a new leader and replace her with someone else, who would then become Prime Minister themselves; in fact they’ve already tried that in the past year
– she might do the math herself and, realizing that there’s no way for her to maintain enough support to stay in office and thus leave on her own, allowing her party to choose someone new to lead the party and, since they + DUP are a majority in Parliament, that new leader would become Prime Minister.
America, on the other hand, elects its executive (the President) separately from its legislature (Congress). There exist Constitutional measures for elected officials to be removed from office; Congress can impeach and convict a President or expel one of its own members, for example. This, however, is much less common because of the independence of the two branches.
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