Form of government

 
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For a list of government forms, see List of forms of government

A form of government, or form of state governance, refers to the set of political institutions by which a government of a state is organized in order to exert its powers over a house in the congress body politic. Synonyms include "regime type" and "system of government".

Contents

Main forms

Other empirical and conceptual problems

On the surface, identifying a form of government appears to be easy. Most would say that the United States is a democratic republic while the former Soviet Union was a totalitarian state. However, as Kopstein and Lichbach (2005:4) argue, defining regimes is tricky. Defining a form of government is especially problematic when trying to identify those elements that are essential to that form. There appears to be a disparity between being able to identify a form of government and identifying the necessary characteristics of that form.

For example, in trying to identify the essential characteristics of a democracy, one might say "elections." However, both citizens of the former Soviet Union and citizens of the United States voted for candidates to public office in their respective states. The problem with such a comparison is that most people are not likely to accept it because it does not comport with their sense of reality. Since most people are not going to accept an evaluation that makes the former Soviet Union as democratic as the United States, the usefulness of the concept is undermined.

In political science, it has long been a goal to create a typology or taxonomy of polities, as typologies of political systems are not obvious [1]. It is especially important in the political science fields of comparative politics and international relations. One important example of a book which attempts to do so is Robert Dahl's Polyarchy (Yale University Press (1971)).

One approach is to further elaborate on the nature of the characteristics found within each regime. In the example of the United States and the Soviet Union, both did conduct elections, and yet one important difference between these two regimes is that the USSR had a single-party system, with all other parties being outlawed. In contrast, the United States effectively has a bipartisan system with political parties being regulated, but not forbidden. A system generally seen as a representative democracy (for instance Canada, India and the United States) may also include measures providing for: a degree of direct democracy in the form of referendums and for deliberative democracy in the form of the extensive processes required for constitutional amendment.

Another complication is that a huge number of political systems originate as socio-economic movements and are then carried into governments by specific parties naming themselves after those movements. Experience with those movements in power, and the strong ties they may have to particular forms of government, can cause them to be considered as forms of government in themselves. Some examples are as follows:

Map


World's states colored by form of government as of April 2006.
Full presidential republics.
Presidential republics with the role of the president and prime minister combined.
Semi-presidential republics.
Parliamentary republics.
Parliamentary constitutional monarchies in which the monarch does not personally exercise power.
Parliamentary constitutional monarchies in which the monarch personally exercises power (often alongside a weak parliament).
Absolute monarchies.
Single-party state.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Lewellen, Ted C. Political Anthropology: An Introduction Third Edition. Praeger Publishers; 3rd edition (November 30, 2003)

Further reading

External links