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A government is the system or group of people governing an organized community, generally a state.
In the case of its broad associative definition, government normally consists of legislature, executive, and judiciary. Government is a means by which organizational policies are enforced, as well as a mechanism for determining policy. In many countries, the government has a kind of constitution, a statement of its governing principles and philosophy.
While all types of organizations have governance, the term government is often used more specifically to refer to the approximately 200 independent national governments and subsidiary organizations.
The main types of modern recognized are democracy, totalitarian regimes, and, sitting between these two, authoritarianism with a variety of . Modern classification systems also include monarchy as a standalone entity or as a hybrid system of the main three. Historically prevalent forms of government include monarchy, aristocracy, timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, theocracy, and tyrant. These forms are not always mutually exclusive, and are common. The main aspect of any philosophy of government is how political power is obtained, with the two main forms being election and hereditary succession.
The word government derives from the Greek verb κυβερνάω meaning to steer with a gubernaculum (rudder), the metaphorical sense being attested in the literature of classical antiquity, including Plato's Ship of State. In British English, "government" sometimes refers to what's also known as a "ministry" or an "administration", i.e., the policies and government officials of a particular executive or governing coalition. Finally, government is also sometimes used in English as a synonym for rule or governance.
In other languages, may have a narrower scope, such as the government of Portugal, which is more similar to the concept of "administration".
One reason that explains the emergence of governments includes agriculture. Since the Neolithic Revolution, agriculture has been an efficient method to create food surplus. This enabled people to specialize in non-agricultural activities. Some of them included being able to rule over others as an external authority. Others included social experimentation with diverse governance models. Both these activities formed the basis of governments. These governments gradually became more complex as agriculture supported larger and denser populations, creating new Culture and Social issue that the government needed to control. David Christian explains
Another explanation includes the need to properly manage infrastructure projects such as water infrastructure. Historically, this required centralized administration and complex social organisation, as seen in regions like Mesopotamia. However, there is archaeological evidence that shows similar successes with more egalitarian and decentralized complex societies.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there was a significant increase in the size and scale of government at the national level. This included the regulation of corporations and the development of the welfare state.
Superficially, all governments have an official de jure or ideal form. The United States is a federal constitutional republic, while the former Soviet Union was a federal Socialist state. However, self-identification is not objective, and as Kopstein and Lichbach argue, defining regimes can be tricky, especially de facto, when both its government and its economy deviate in practice. For example, Voltaire argued that "the Holy Roman Empire is neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire". In practice, the Soviet Union was a centralized autocratic one-party state under Joseph Stalin.
Identifying a form of government can be challenging because many originate from socio-economic movements, and the parties that carry those movements into power often name themselves after those ideologies. These parties may have competing political ideologies and strong ties to particular forms of government. As a result, the movements themselves can sometimes be mistakenly considered as forms of government, rather than the ideologies that influence the governing system.Hague, R., & Harrop, M. (2013). Comparative government and politics: An introduction (9th ed.). Palgrave Macmillan.
Other complications include general non-consensus or deliberate "Disinformation" of reasonable technical definitions of political ideologies and associated forms of governing, due to the nature of politics in the modern era. For example: The meaning of "conservatism" in the United States has little in common with the way the word's definition is used elsewhere. As Ribuffo notes, "what Americans now call conservatism much of the world calls liberalism or neoliberalism"; a "conservative" in Finland would be labeled a "socialist" in the United States. Since the 1950s, conservatism in the United States has been chiefly associated with right-wing politics and the Republican Party. However, during the era of segregation many Southern Democrats were conservatives, and they played a key role in the conservative coalition that controlled Congress from 1937 to 1963.
These five regimes progressively degenerate starting with aristocracy at the top and tyranny at the bottom.
In his Politics, Aristotle elaborates on Plato's five regimes discussing them in relation to the government of one, of the few, and of the many. From this follows the classification of forms of government according to which people have the authority to rule: either one person (an autocracy, such as monarchy), a select group of people (an aristocracy), or the people as a whole (a democracy, such as a republic).
Thomas Hobbes stated on their classification:
Many monarchies were aristocracies, although in modern constitutional monarchies, the monarch may have little effective power. The term aristocracy could also refer to the non-peasant, non-servant, and non-city classes in feudalism.Blickle, P. (1997). Resistance, representation and community. Oxford University Press.
Some governments combine both direct and indirect democratic governance, wherein the citizenry selects representatives to administer day-to-day governance, while also reserving the right to govern directly through popular initiatives, (plebiscites), and the Recall election. In a constitutional democracy the powers of the majority are exercised within the framework of representative democracy, but the constitution limits majority rule, usually through the provision by all of certain , such as freedom of speech or freedom of association. Oxford English Dictionary: "democracy".
A common simplified definition of a republic is a government where the head of state is not a monarch. Montesquieu included both democracy, where all the people have a share in rule, and aristocracy or oligarchy, where only some of the people rule, as republican forms of government.
Other terms used to describe different republics include democratic republic, parliamentary republic, semi-presidential republic, presidential republic, federal republic, people's republic, and Islamic republic.
Governments are often organised into three branches with separate powers: a legislature, an executive, and a judiciary; this is sometimes called the trias politica model. However, in and semi-presidential systems, branches of government often intersect, having shared membership and overlapping functions. Many governments have fewer or additional branches, such as an independent electoral commission or auditory branch.
A majority government is a government by one or more Governing party together holding an absolute majority of seats in the parliament, in contrast to a minority government in which they have only a plurality of seats and often depend on a confidence-and-supply arrangement with other parties. A coalition government is one in which multiple parties cooperate to form a government as part of a coalition agreement. In a single-party government, a single party forms a government without the support of a coalition, as is typically the case with majority governments, but even a minority government may consist of just one party unable to find a willing coalition partner at the moment.
A state that continuously maintains a single-party government within a (nominally) multiparty system possesses a dominant-party system. In a (nondemocratic) one-party system a single ruling party has the (more-or-less) exclusive right to form the government, and the formation of other parties may be obstructed or illegal. In some cases, a government may have a Nonpartisanism, as is the case with absolute monarchy or non-partisan democracy.
by the Economist Intelligence Unit, 2017
Full Democracies
Flawed Democracies
Hybrid Regimes
Authoritarian Regimes
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