Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how executive politics functioned as a personal and elite game in Sri Lanka in the early years after independence placing parties and other democratic institutions in an inferior role

Paper long abstract:

When Sri Lanka became independent in February 1948 it lacked a well established party system and instead relied upon patronage and elite social relationships to carry out executive power. Though it had a long pre-independence history of constitutional development and evolving democracy, party politics was not deep-rooted and instead political power continued to be wielded by an elite that had an almost feudal relationship with the masses. The convention based Westminster model Sri Lanka adopted engendered a local system that relied more on relationships than rules. Political parties and institutions were often unable to check and balance the Executive's conduct of power. Sri Lanka's elite operated British institutions in an anachronistic eighteenth-century manner such as in having a patronage-based Cabinet dominated by its prime ministerial leader/patron rather than by collegial attitudes or values. The weakness of party institutionalisation and the ambiguity in the constitutional arrangements even allowed Governors-General to exercise much more power at times than has any modern British monarch or their democratic counterparts. The sanguine continuity of affairs of state from the colonial era and the known and reassuring leadership of D.S. Senanayake and his "Uncle-Nephew Party" masked the democratic tensions and institutional fragility within the Sri Lankan state that would come to the fore violently only years after the tranquil transfer of power. Sri Lanka is still grappling with these issues and tensions today.