Does a country's separation of powers affect its status culture?

I was recently wondering whether countries with more centralized executive and legislative powers (less checks and balances) might have more status-intensive cultures — or in some way a qualitatively different type of status culture. My hypothesis is inchoate but here it goes.

When a government has few checks and balances (e.g. the UK is known for having a pretty centralized, unified government), the flow of public funds into civil society is highly conditional on the subjective status-estimates of a small set of people (those in government). By subjective status estimates I mean the personal impressions of the rulers regarding what people and projects out in the world are good, valuable, desirable, attractive, etc. When a government has a lot of checks and balances, the flow of public funds into civil society is not as conditional on the subjective status-estimates of one small set of agents — it's conditional on many different socially separated sets of agents.

The two countries I have the most experience living in, the US and the UK, occupy the two opposite poles with respect to the centralization of power in a unified government. And it seems to me that status-signaling activity in these countries is different in a noticeable but predictable way. These are just impressions and could be totally wrong, but here's what it looks like to me. It seems to me that much of UK civil society revolves around satisfying the whims of some superior, who is mostly concerned to satisfy the whims of some other superior, and so on upward... But at the top of almost all of these different chains of deference in different subspaces of civil society, is the whim of one group: the government in parliament at that time. This is why, I think, there is a lot of volatility in the priorities of civil society organizations in the UK (the "strategic plan" of a university can easily change once a year for some stretches), and yet the volatility seems strangely correlated (some change in a university's "strategic plan" sounds oddly like some new messaging you encounter from some other Arts organization. There are weird lags and interactions as you descend the pyramid from parliament to civil society, of course, but the diversity of civil society organizations all seem roughly attuned to the one fickle center at the top. So all the status-games feel, to me, weirdly and claustrophobically entrained.

In the US, it's obviously not that status competition is less prevalent, but the many status games of different civil society actors don't all trace upward to one master at the top of the pyramid. It's much more fractured, regarding who different civil society actors are trying to impress. But because it's more fractured, this means individuals have a relatively wider choice of what particular status game they want to play. Those who are immersed in one, don't pay as much attention to those who are playing another. If you find one status game really irksome, then you can potentially switch into another (relative to a country such as the UK).

One can then speculate about what types of people are selected for by these different contexts. I find the overly synchronized, centrally entrained status games of the UK kind of creepy, personally. I think it might make people marginally more delusional. It seems to me that people in the UK, including really smart people, are more likely to take arbitrary government directives as anchors of reality, whereas Americans have more mental leeway to, as it were, take 'em or leave 'em. When everyone else is attuned to the same center, it makes sense that you might mistake what's coming from the center as a vector of reality itself, rather than one contingent possibility among others. Americans often seem "kind of crazy" to non-Americans, and this might help to explain it. The highly fractured nature of government power in the US might make the American individual feel and act kind of like a free agent navigating many contingent possibilities of what reality even is.