The political systems result from the interplay of political forces within the institutional framework defined by the constitution or custom. In addition, other factors, such as history, ideologies and culture, influence the nature of political regimes.
All political regimes are not democratic. Democracies are distinguished by the existence of a plurality of political parties, the freedom of choice given to citizens and the separation of legislative, administrative and judicial powers.
In addition, the various types of democratic regimes can be classified according to whether they favor the collaboration of the different powers (assembly regime, parliamentary regime) or the strict separation of these powers (presidential regime). Some systems are also mixed, being both parliamentary and presidential.
This article will introduce 9 major political systems and forms of government. These notions refer to the configuration of a state to how a country is governed. We will not take an in-depth look into each of the systems presented. Still, this article aims to give the reader some elements of understanding to make him want to deepen his knowledge.
Oligarchy
What is Oligarchy? Oligarchy is a government in which the reality of power is in the hands of a small number of people, some families or a closed group.
Today, oligarchy is enjoying a resurgence in popularity and is being used polemically. In our modern liberal democracies, the citizens are, in theory, the sovereigns. Still, the elite always governs in their place, whether in politics, through its representatives, in the economy (the financial power) or the media. The result can be the feeling of confiscation of power for the benefit of an elite.
The oligarchy can thus be considered a degeneration of democracy. Sociologist Robert Michels (1876 – 1936) theorized the tendency of any organization to turn into an oligarchy (“the iron law of oligarchy”).
The plutocracy and the aristocracy are two variations of oligarchy. Plutocracy (from Greek Ploutos, πλουτος, “wealth”) is the rule of the rich, whereas aristocracy (from Greek aristos, αριστος, “the best”) is the ruling of the best. The aristocracy was favored by the Greek philosophers Plato (428 – 348) and Aristotle (384 – 322).
There have been many oligarchies in history. The ancient oligarchy is often cited as an example of Sparta. Recent examples include the Republic of Venice (which disappeared in 1797), where the power was in the hands of a wealthy oligarchy, and the communist countries, ruled by the privileged elite of party members (the nomenklatura).
Theocracy
What is Theocracy? A theocracy is a political authority based on the divine, the powers of God or the gods. Theocratic government is legitimized by God or the gods; he is the lieutenant of God on earth. The true ruler is the divine power. His laws are indisputable.
Following this definition, nearly all political powers in the history of humankind have been theocratic because governments based their legitimacy on divine power. We know, for instance, that French absolute monarchs considered themselves “God’s lieutenants on earth”.
Yet, we do not think of this kind of regime in common usage when we speak of theocracy. Indeed, a theocracy commonly designates a regime in which the holders of religious authority, in other words, clerics, directly exercise power.
Following this meaning, there are two genuinely theocratic states today: Vatican City, led by the Pope, head of the Catholic Church, and Iran, where the power is in the hands of the Shiite clergy.
Republic
What is Republic? Republic is an ancient concept that we inherited from ancient Rome. The Romans formed a republic, the so-called Roman Republic, after having expelled their last king, Tarquillo the Magnificent (534 – 509 B.C.). Romans remained famous for their hatred of kingship, to such an extent that Roma remained a republic in spirit under the Empire. The roman emperor ruled a republic.
The concept of the republic has since been studied and enriched by many authors. It can usually be summarized as “government” or “community of mind”.
Today, the term “Republic” is used to describe a regime that is not a monarchy, that is to say, one in which the head of state, the individual who is theoretically at the top of the pyramid of powers, has been elected by the nation or its representatives. The Head of State is usually a president, although not always.
Taking Iran as an example, Iran is an Islamic republic. It is both a republic, as there is no longer a king, as the last king was deposed in 1979, and also a theocracy, as power is in the hands of clerics (the official leader of the country being an ayatollah, a religious dignitary of Shiite Islam). As another example, the French First Republic (1792 – 1804), which was proclaimed after the fall of Louis XVI (1774 – 1792), had no president.
A republic is not necessarily a democracy, that is, a state where the people run the country’s affairs or a system in which the government is accountable to the nation. China, for instance, may be a republic (a communist “people’s republic”) but is not a democracy.
The notion of a republic in many countries does not only mean that power is not monarchical. The concept of a republic often carries a particular ideology and is the rule of certain principles. The republics often follow archaic and authoritarian regimes and thus symbolize the advent of new freedom and autonomy of the nation in the eyes of citizens.
Dictatorship
What is Dictatorship? Dictatorship comes from the Latin word dictatura. The dictatorship was a magistracy in the cities of ancient Italy. One man had extraordinary powers to carry out a mission. The dictatorship was exercised for a specific purpose. This term came down to us from ancient Rome. The term dictatorship is remembered for two reasons: Sylla (138 – 78) and Caesar (100 – 44).
The notion of dictatorship has now lost its ancient meaning, except for certain specific contexts. Nineteenth-century socialism developed the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the period of the absolute power of the working class that should allow the passage to socialism. Writers such as Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) have developed a modern theory of constitutional dictatorship to deal with periods of crisis.
Outside of these singular uses, the concept of dictatorship has become synonymous with despotism. A dictatorship is an authoritarian regime in which citizens have little or no legal protection.
For example, the leaders of totalitarian states in the 20th century, like Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), Joseph Stalin (1878-1954), Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) or Mao Zedong (1893-1976), are referred to as dictators. Nevertheless, all dictatorships are not totalitarian (South American dictatorships of the 20th century, African dictatorships, etc.).
Democracy
What is Democracy? A democracy is a form of government in which the people exercise power directly through the vote or indirectly through elected representatives (president, parliamentarians, mayors, etc.).
But more profoundly, it is a regime in which the sovereign is the people themselves. Democracy is the power of the people or the political regime where all the powers draw their legitimacy from the people, where the people or their representatives exercise all powers. Thus, democracy is the government of the people, by the people and for the people.
We find this formula in the famous Gettysburg Address (1863) by Abraham Lincoln (1809 – 1865), the 16th President of the United States of America, or in article 2 of the Constitution of 1958, the Constitution of France. The government of the people implies the protection of human rights, or the rights of citizens, to ensure that all opinions can be expressed and represented.
The term democracy is not limited to the idea that the people are sovereign. Numerous thinkers, including Alexis de Tocqueville (1805 – 1859), have demonstrated that democracy is also a form of society.
Society in a democracy is characterized by an equalization of conditions (i.e., citizens, equal in rights, tend to certain social equality and see themselves as each other’s equals), by a vitality of civil society (the development of associations, unions, political parties, etc.), by the development of individualism, etc.
However, all democracies are not necessarily regimes of freedom (liberal democracies). Representatives are elected in certain nations, but the exercise of power remains authoritarian.
At the same time, when we consider our political system, that is to say, all the elements that contribute to the exercise of power (media, ideologies, financial powers), some people tend to think that our power is confiscated for the benefit of an oligarchy.
Democracy can just as easily be a republic or a monarchy. Italy, Germany and France are republics, but the United Kingdom, France, Spain and the Netherlands are monarchies. Theocracy can even have a democratic dimension.
Monarchy
What is Monarchy? The monarchy is the regime in which only one person commands: the ruler. The latter, a king, emperor, caliph, emir, or other, accedes to power either by election or inheritance (thus constituting dynasties, such as the Capetians in France, the Hohenzollerns in Germany, etc.).
The methods of the monarch’s power vary according to the times and cultures. For instance, the power exercised by a Roman emperor, all-powerful but not very legitimate, had little to do with that of the ancient kings of Poland, who were elected kings whose power depended on that of the nobles.
The overwhelming majority of monarchies today are constitutional. In constitutional monarchies, the position of the monarch is symbolic, having the power of influence rather than real power and representing the nation that consents to his rule. The head of government provides the direction of affairs. This is true of the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Spain, Japan, etc.
Some monarchies remain where the monarch (or his family) still has great power, such as Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Jordan.
The French Republic has not had a king since the fall of Louis-Philippe I (1830 – 1848) in 1848, nor has it had a monarch since the fall of Napoleon III (1852 – 1870) in 1870. The 1789 French Revolution had put an end to the Ancien Régime, the period under which the monarch was “absolute”, meaning that he held his power only from himself without being accountable to anyone.
Absolutism was not a despotism because the king’s power was limited by fundamental laws and by the numerous rights of the Ancien Régime. According to Maurice Duverger (1917 – 2014), the 5th republic, the regime in force in France, where the president has very large prerogatives, has been described as a “republican monarchy”.
Totalitarianism
What is Totalitarianism? Totalitarianism is a complex notion. It designates above all a phenomenon, the rise of extreme dictatorial regimes in the 20th century: Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, the USSR and Maoist China. In these regimes, the state sought to control and subjugate the whole of social life to its power.
Society and citizens have no right to autonomy (the nation cannot set its laws) and no freedom in totalitarian regimes. The group dominates the individual. A unique party, controlling all the wheels of power, headed by a charismatic leader, tries to shape society according to its ideology (fascism, Nazism, communism).
To do this, it makes use of an apparatus of repression and terror (arbitrary arrests of opponents, detention in camps, etc.), propaganda (monopoly of the media, control of cultural production) and methods of enlisting the “masses” (militarization of society, the creation of youth organizations, compulsory membership in associations, etc.).
We speak, concerning totalitarian ideologies, of political religions: just like theocratic societies, holy laws are imposed without discussion on totalitarian societies, but rather than being of divine origin, they come from the secular origin (they come from this world).
The philosopher Hannah Arendt studied the phenomenon of totalitarianism in The Origins of Totalitarianism.
Feudalism
What is Feudalism? Feudality comes from fief, land, income, right, etc., granted by a suzerain (the master) to a vassal (the inferior, dependent on the lord and who can be suzerain in his turn) in exchange for his loyalty and services.
The word “feudalism” traditionally characterizes the society of the European Middle Ages, although the feudal system continues beyond these limits. This is a complex and debated notion. It refers to a society with fragmented power.
The sovereignty is disseminated between the different lordships: a lord governs land and exercises justice there. The motor of this dissemination is vassalage: a Lord, in a position of suzerain (for example, the king), offers his protection to a vassal and cedes him a fiefdom in exchange for his homage and his loyalty. The same vassal can become lord, creating chains of loyalty.
The feudal society is further characterized by the relationship between the lord and his dependents, between nobles and non-nobles, and between the countryside and cities.
The concept of feudalism was given a pejorative connotation after 19th-century socialism and Marxism transformed into feudalism. The term feudalism has been used ever since when speaking of a modern country, refers to a regime in which authority is divided among rival powers or where money powers dominate the state. Feudal is also a pejorative term to describe an outdated and unjust system.
Despotism
What is Despotism? Despotism comes from the Greek word despots (δεσποτης), “the master in the house,” “the master of slaves. The term despot was in use in the Byzantine Empire. There were also despotates (Epirus, Morea, Serbia…).
However, the term despotism, probably of French origin, has negative connotations. Despotism designates an arbitrary and oppressive power exercised outside the limits of the law. The Enlightenment philosopher Montesquieu (1689 – 1755) made it one of the three forms of government alongside the republic and the monarchy.
Despotism is, according to him, the monarchy without legality: “[…] one, with no law and no rule, drags everything along by his will and by his whims.”
However, in the eighteenth century, certain philosophers placed their hopes on the power of enlightened despots (Voltaire and Frederick II, and Diderot and Catherine of Russia, Joseph II, etc.) to rule by reason for the progress and happiness of the people. Nowadays, “despotism” is rarely used unless in refined and literary contexts.
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