Definitions

One approach is to define government as the decision-making arm of the state, and define the latter on the basis of the control it has over violence and the use of force within its territory. Specifically, the state (and by extension the government) has been considered by some to be the entity that holds a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within a territory. This view has been taken by the political economist Max Weber and subsequent political philosophers. The exact meaning of it depends on what is understood by “legitimate”. If we use the term in an ethical sense, then this definition would suggest that an organisation might be considered a state by its supporters but not by its detractors. An alternative definition is to take “legitimate” violence to be simply that which has active or tacit acceptance by the vast majority of the population. In this view, the presence of insurrection or civil war against an entity would jeopardise its claim to be a state, provided the insurrection enjoyed significant popular support. Similarly, an entity that shared military or police power with independent militias and bandits could be considered to have a monopoly on “legitimate” violence but to be failing to enforce it, reducing its claim to statehood. In practice, such situations are often described as “failed states”.

Government can also be defined as the political means of creating and enforcing laws; typically via a bureaucratic hierarchy. Under this definition, a purely despotic organization which controls a territory without defining laws would not be considered a government.

Another alternative is to define a government as an organisation that attempts to maintain control of a territory, where “control” involves activities such as collecting taxes, controlling entry and exit to the state, preventing encroachment of territory by neighbouring states and preventing the establishment of alternative governments within the country.

In Commonwealth English, the word “Government” can also be used to refer only to the executive branch, in this context being a synonym for the word “administration” in American English (e.g. the Blair Government, the Bush Administration). In countries using the Westminster system, the Government (or party in Government) will also usually control the legislature. The French use of the word gouvernement covers both meanings, whereas Canadian French generally uses it to mean the executive branch. The German word Regierung refers only to government as the executive branch; the wider meaning of the word, government as a system, can be translated as Staatsgewalt.

Forms of government

Main article
Various forms of government have been implemented. A government in a developed state is likely to have various sub-organisations known as offices, departments, or agencies, which are headed by politically appointed officials, often called ministers or secretaries. Ministers may in theory act as advisors to the head of state, but in practice have a certain amount of direct power in specific areas. In most modern democracies, the elected legislative assembly has the power to dismiss the government, but in those states that have a separate head of government and head of state, the head of state generally has great latitude in appointing a new one.

Theories

There are a wide range of theories about the reasons for establishing governments. The four major ones are briefly described below. Note that they do not always fully oppose each other – it is possible for a person to subscribe to a combination of ideas from two or more of these theories.

Greed and oppression

Many political philosophies that are opposed to the existence of a government (such as Anarchism, and to a lesser extent Marxism), as well as others, emphasize the historical roots of governments – the fact that governments, along with private property, originated from the authority of warlords and petty despots who took, by force, certain patches of land as their own (and began exercising authority over the people living on that land). Thus, it is argued that governments exist to enforce the will of the strong and oppress the weak.

Order and tradition

The various forms of conservatism, by contrast, generally see the government as a positive force that brings order out of chaos, establishes laws to end the “war of all against all”, encourages moral virtue while punishing vice, and respects tradition. Sometimes, in this view, the government is seen as something ordained by a higher power, as in the divine right of kings, which human beings have a duty to obey.

Natural rights

Natural rights are the basis for the theory of government shared by most branches of liberalism (including libertarianism). In this view, human beings are born with certain
natural rights, and governments are established strictly for the purpose of protecting those rights. What the
natural rights actually are is a matter of dispute among liberals; indeed, each branch of liberalism has its own set of rights that it considers to be
natural, and these rights are sometimes mutually exclusive with the rights supported by other liberals.

Social contract

One of the most influential theories of government in the past two hundred years has been the social contract, on which modern democracy and most forms of socialism are founded. The social contract theory holds that governments are created by the people in order to provide for collective needs (such as safety from crime) that cannot be properly satisfied using purely individual means. Governments thus exist for the purpose of serving the needs and wishes of the people, and their relationship with the people is clearly stipulated in a “social contract” (a constitution and a set of laws) which both the government and the people must abide by. If a majority is unhappy, it may change the social contract. If a minority is unhappy, it may persuade the majority to change the contract, or it may opt out of it by emigration or secession.

Operations

Main article
Governments concern themselves with regulating and administering many areas of human activity, such as trade, education, medicine, entertainment, and war.

Enforcement of power

Governments use a variety of methods to maintain the established order, such as police and military forces, (particularly under despotism, see also police state), making agreements with other states, and maintaining support within the state. Typical methods of maintaining support and legitimacy include providing the infrastructure for administration, justice, transport, communication, social welfare etc., claiming support from deities, providing benefits to elites, holding elections for important posts within the state, limiting the power of the state through laws and constitutions (see also Bill of Rights) and appealing to nationalism. Different political ideologies hold different ideas on what the government should or should not do.

Territory

The modern standard unit of territory is a country. In addition to the meaning used above, the word state can refer either to a government or to its territory. Within a territory, subnational entities may have local governments which do not have the full power of a national government (for example, they will generally lack the authority to declare war or carry out diplomatic negotiations).

Scale of government

The scale to which government should exist and operate in the world is a matter of debate. Government spending in developed countries varies considerably but generally makes up between about 30% and 70% of their GDP.

Democracy is, literally, rule by the people (from the Greek demos, “people,” and kratos, “rule”). The methods by which this rule is exercised, and indeed the composition of “the people” are central to various definitions of democracy, but the general principle is that of majority rule. Useful contrasts can be made with oligarchies and autocracies, where political authority is highly concentrated and not subject to meaningful control by the people. While the term democracy is often used in the context of a political state, the principles are also applicable to other areas of governance.

Kinds of democracy

Direct democracy, classically termed

pure democracy[1], is a political system where the people vote on government decisions, such as questions of whether to approve or reject various laws. It is called
direct because the power of making decisions is exercised by the people directly, without intermediaries or representatives. Historically, this form of government has been rare, due to the difficulties of getting all the people of a certain territory in one place for the purpose of voting. All direct democracies to date have been relatively small communities; usually city-states. The most notable was the ancient Athenian democracy.

Representative democracy is so named because the people do not vote on most government decisions directly, but select representatives to a governing body or assembly. Representatives may be chosen by the electorate as a whole (as in many proportional systems) or represent a particular subset (usually a geographic district or constituency), with some systems using a combination of the two. Many representative democracies incorporate some elements of direct democracy, such as referenda.

The one party Communist states describe or described themselves as democratic, like the German Democratic Republic. They explicitly gave the political power to the members, or to some of the members, of the ruling Communist Party, following the principles of democratic centralism and vanguard party.

Liberal democracy

Today, democracy is often assumed to be liberal democracy, a form of representative democracy where the ability of elected representatives and the will of the majority to exercise decision-making power is subject to the rule of law, and usually moderated by a constitution which emphasizes the protection of liberties, freedoms, and rights of individuals and minorities. This form of government has become increasingly common in recent times, so that almost half of the world’s population now lives under liberal democratic regimes.[1]

Conversely, an illiberal democracy is one where the protections that form a liberal democracy are either nonexistant, or not enforced. The experience in some post-Soviet states drew attention to the phenomenon, although it is not of recent origin.

History of democracy

The history of democracy is made complex by the varied concepts and definitions used in different contexts and discussions. Democracy can range from the very broadly based institutions in which adult universal suffrage is used to elect representative, to very informal assemblies in which the people voice their opinions, and leader act upon those feelings, to elected representatives who have limited power under an unelected monarch.

Athenian democracy is the earliest well-documented democratic system, and the word democracy was coined in Ancient Greece in the 5th century BC. Records are intermittent from the time before this era, although there is contemporary documentation from Chios, probably from 575- 550 BC, of a council and assembly. It appears that voting rights were gradually expanded from a small group of landed aristocracy to eventually all eligible males who had completed mandatory military training, usually at the age of 20. Women, slaves, and metics were excluded from this citizenship, which leads to estimates that around one tenth or less of the population of Athens was eligible to vote. All Athenian citizens were free to vote on creation of laws, a segment could vote on when to go to war, and anyone could speak in the Assembly. This type of government is known as a form of direct democracy. Athens also had representative leaders, most selected by allotment rather than elected. Athenian democracy was effectively ended by the city’s defeat by the Macedonians who abolished it in 323 BC.

The seeds of representative democracy were arguably started in the Roman Republic. During the middle ages, there were various shades of democracies varying from very inclusive oligarchies to attempts at full democracy. Such are the Althing, in Iceland, the Italian city-states of medieval Italy, the tuatha system in early medieval Ireland, the Veche in Slavic countries, and Scandinavian assemblies. And, democratic principles or elements have also been claimed for societies ranging from the early Indian republics (c. 500 BCE) to the Iroquois Confederacy in North America (second millennium CE to the present).

The Parliament of England was the first major step towards a fully democratic system during the Middle Ages. It had its roots in the restrictions on the power of kings written into Magna Carta. The first elected parliament was De Montfort’s Parliament in England in 1265. Parliament was initially elected by only a few percent of the population and the system had problematic features such as rotten boroughs. The power to call parliament was at the pleasure of the monarch (usually when he or she needed funds). After the Glorious Revolution of 1688, England became a constitutional monarchy with regular sittings of parliament, although still subject to the monarch. During this time the two party system of the Whigs and Tories also developed. Parliament then gradually gained more decision-making and legislative powers until the reign of Queen Victoria at which time the monarch essentially became a figurehead.

The United States can be seen as the first liberal democracy, [2] with a relatively wide franchise (although initially limited by property and gender restrictions, and the existence of slavery) and the United States Constitution protected rights and liberties.

A few years later, Revolutionary France adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and, although short-lived, the National Convention was elected by all males.

Liberal democracies were few and often short-lived before the late nineteenth century. Various nations and territories have claimed to be the first with universal suffrage.

20th century waves of democracy

20th century transitions to liberal democracy have come in successive “waves of democracy”, variously resulting from wars, revolutions, decolonization and economic circumstances. World War I and the dissolution of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires resulted in the creation of new nation-states in Europe, most of them nominally democratic. The rise of fascist movements, and fascist regimes in Nazi Germany, Mussolini in Italy, Francisco Franco’s regime in Spain and Antonio de Oliveira Salazar’s regime in Portugal, limited the extent of democracy in the 1930s, and gave the impression of an “Age of Dictators”. The status of most colonies remained unaffected.

World War II brought a definitive reversal of this trend in western Europe. The successful democratization of the occupied Germany and the occupied Japan served as a model for the later theory of regime change. However, most of Eastern Europe was forced into the non-democratic Soviet bloc. The war was followed by decolonisation, and again most of the new independent states had nominally democratic constitutions.

In the decades following World War II, most western democratic nations had a predominantly free-market economy and developed a welfare state, reflecting a general consensus among their electorates and political parties. In the 1950s and 1960s, economic growth was high in both the western and communist countries, later it declined in the state-controlled economies. By 1960, the vast majority of nation-states were nominally democracies, although the majority of the world’s populations lived in nations that experienced sham elections, and other forms of subterfuge (particularly in Communist nations and the former colonies.)

A subsequent wave of democratization brought substantial gains toward true liberal democracy for many nations. Several of the military dictatorships in South America become democratic in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This was followed by nations in East and South Asia by the mid- to late 1980s. Economic malaise in the 1980s, along with resentment of communist oppression, contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the associated end of the Cold War, and the democratisation and liberalisation of the former Soviet bloc countries. The most successful of the new democracies were those geographically and culturally closest to western Europe, and they are now members or candidate members of the European Union. The democratic trend spread to some nations in Africa in the 1990s, most prominently in South Africa.

The number of liberal democracies currently stands at an all-time high, and has been growing without interruption for some time. As such, it has been speculated that this trend may continue in the future to the point where liberal democratic nation-states become the universal standard form of human society. This prediction forms the core of Francis Fukayama’s “End of History” theory.

Major theories of democracy

Conceptions of democracy

Among political theorists, there are many contending conceptions of democracy.

On one account, called minimalism, democracy is a system of government in which citizens give teams of political leaders the right to rule in periodic elections. According to this minimalist conception, citizens cannot and should not “rule” because on most issues, most of the time, they have no clear views or their views are not very intelligent. Joseph Schumpeter articulated this view most famously in his book

Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy [2]. Contemporary proponents of minimalism include William Riker, Adam Przeworksi, and Richard Posner.

A second view is called the aggregative conception of democracy. It holds that government should produce laws and policies are close to the views of the median voter — with half to his left and the other half to his right. Anthony Downs laid out this view in his 1957 book
An Economic Theory of Democracy. [3]

A third conception, deliberative democracy, is based on the notion that democracy is government by discussion. Deliberative democrats contend that laws and policies should be based upon reasons that all citizens can accept. The political arena should be one in which leaders and citizens make arguments, listen, and change their minds.

The three conceptions above assume a representative democracy. Direct democracy, a fourth conception, holds that citizens should participate directly, not through their representatives, in making laws and policies. Proponents of direct democracy offer varied reasons to support this view. Political activity can be valuable in itself, it socializes and educates citizens, and popular participation can check powerful elites. Most importantly, citizens do not really rule themselves unless they directly decide laws and policies.

Another conception of democracy is that it means political equality between all citizens. The typical modern democracy relies on the assumption that the majority of the votes establishes the will of the people, as opposed to majority rule of the entire demos (population). This can be used as an argument for making political participation mandatory, like compulsory voting, or for limiting the influence of the wealthy, like Campaign finance reform.[3][4]

These conceptions of democracy are based on the question of what a democracy
ought to be. A fifth and quite different conception of democracy is based on the assumption that a democracy performs a
function for the members of a collective who create it and that individuals in a democracy play
roles. This conception assumes that the actual people who occupy these roles and perform this function in a real democracy are self-interested. The conception was invented by economists and is sometimes called an economic approach to democracy. It is represented by the field of Public Choice.

Another conception of democracy is that it is majority rule and is justified under utilitarian reasoning. The advantanges of democracy seen under this conception is that the majority of the population are satisfied with the governance they live under. The disadvantage is that the minority live under the power of the majority sometimes termed the tyranny of the majority, or mob rule. This can lead to the marginalisation of large portions of a population if the will of the majority is not restrained by a strong and just constitution and legal system.