It's about time this topic has its own blog post. It's been an aside to other discussions on several occasions. It's not so much a difference between American and British English per se, but a difference in how our political systems work, and hence a difference in which words we need to use about them.
Because the UK has a
parliamentary system of government, the political party that controls the parliament is the ruling party of the government as a whole. So, people talk about
the Labour government or
the Conservative government when that party has the majority of seats in the House of Commons, since that party chooses the person who will be prime minister, who then makes the political appointments to cabinet positions. That party is, essentially, governing.
The US has a presidential system, in which the president is elected independently of the legislature. The executive (presidential) and legislative branches of government are accorded their own powers, and the party in control of the executive branch may not be in control of either or both of the legislative chambers (the Senate and the House of Representatives). So when talking about the president and cabinet, it's inaccurate to say things like the Obama government (let me live in the past, please), since the president leads only one branch of the government. Instead, we usually speak of the Obama administration.
So, this isn't really a difference between AmE and BrE because if Americans talk about British politics, they would need the more parliamentary language, and if Britons talk about American politics, they'll need the more presidential language, for accuracy. But do people always speak accurately about these things?
For government, they mostly do. The images below show the most common words between the and government in the AmE & BrE parts of the Corpus of Global Web-Based English, which was collected in 2012–13, when the UK had a coalition government of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties. There, you can see coalition and Labour in the UK data, but only general adjectives and countries in the American. That hasn't changed in more recent data. There's little talk about the Biden government or the Trump government.
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| Most common words before government in GloWbE AmE subcorpus |
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| Most common words before government in GloWbE BrE subcorpus |
At American sub-national levels, it works the same: American states have 'presidential' systems (just with governors, rather than presidents) and therefore they have administrations led by the governors, and American cities generally have city councils and mayors (details vary from state/city to state/city), and so we can talk of the administration of a mayor or a governor. You can see that in the GloWbE results below, where administration is mostly prefaced by names of presidents, but also, at the bottom Bloomberg, who was mayor of New York City at the time.
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| most common words between the and administration in US GloWbE |
In the UK, Wales and Scotland have their own parliaments, and so we see them having governments in the chart above. At the county and city level, there are councils, and people tend to use the word council instead of government at the local level—e.g. the Labour council.
Directly elected mayors are a 21st-century thing in England, and we don't yet seem to be seeing much use of mayor's name + administration. I tried Johnson administration in GloWbE (since Boris J was London mayor in GloWbE time), but all examples in the UK referred to Lyndon Baines Johnson, the American president—and most of the other the ___ administration examples in UK GloWbE refer to American politics. (I also looked for the Khan administration in a more current corpus, but there one finds it referring to Pakistani politics, not the government of London.) But there is an interesting point at the bottom of this chart:
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most common words between the and administration in UK GloWbE
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is about 29 times less common than
the Labour government, but it's there. A closer look at the data indicates that this use of
administration is more common in Scotland—with most, if not all of the
Labours from Scotland, and certainly all of the
SNPs (Scottish National Party):
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| the + [UK party name] + administration |
But that usage is going up, across the country:
Without any willingness to go through a lot of examples, I can't tell you how many of these administrations refer to the UK government versus devolved country governments or local governments, but I believe there's a mix. There are a very small number of cases of the Sunak administration and the Starmer administration as well.
Administration is not the first US political word I've seen used in a slightly-less-appropriate way in the UK:
gerrymander was my US-to-UK Word of the Year in 2016. But lest you think political words only go in one direction, I'll point you to
backbencher, my 2015 UK-to-US Word of the Year.
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There seems to be a different British sense of "administration" with reference to what the (nominally apolitical) Civil Service does -- something that doesn't have a real US analog(ue). My fellow USians may be familiar with this usage from having watched "Yes, Minister".
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