In political science, a political system means the form of political organization that can be observed, recognised or otherwise declared by a society or state.
It defines the process for making official government decisions. It usually comprizes the governmental legal system and economic system, social system and cultural system, and other state and government specific systems. However, this is a very simplified view of a much more complex system of categories involving the questions of who should have authority and what the government influence on its people and economy should be.
Along with a basic sociological and socio-anthropological classification, political systems can be classified on a social-cultural axis relative to the liberal values prevalent in the Western world, where the spectrum is represented as a continuum between political systems recognized as democracies,
totalitarian regimes and, sitting between these two, authoritarian regimes, with a variety of hybrid regimes;
Definition
According to
David Easton, "A political system can be designated as the interactions through which values are authoritatively allocated for a society".
Political system refers broadly to the process by which laws are made and public resources allocated in society, and to the relationships among those involved in making these decisions.
Basic classification
Social anthropologists generally recognize several kinds of political systems, often differentiating between ones that they consider uncentralized and ones they consider centralized.
[Haviland, W.A. (2003). Anthropology: Tenth Edition. Wadsworth:Belmont, CA.]
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Uncentralized systems
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Band society
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Small family group, no larger than an extended family or clan; it has been defined as consisting of no more than 30 to 50 individuals.
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A band can cease to exist if only a small group walks out.
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Tribe
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Generally larger, consisting of many families. Tribes have more social institutions, such as a chief or elders.
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More permanent than bands. Many tribes are subdivided into bands.
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Centralized governments
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Chiefdom
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More complex than a tribe or a band society, and less complex than a state or a civilization
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Characterized by pervasive inequality and centralization of authority.
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A single lineage/family of the elite class becomes the ruling elite of the chiefdom
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Complex chiefdoms have two or even three tiers of political hierarchy.
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"An autonomous political unit comprising a number of villages or communities under the permanent control of a paramount chief"
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Sovereign state
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A sovereign state is a state with a permanent population, a defined territory, a government and the capacity to enter into relations with other sovereign states.
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Supranational political systems
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Supranational political systems are created by independent nations to reach a common goal or gain strength from forming an alliance.
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Empires are widespread states consisting of people of different ethnicities under a single rule. Empires - such as the Romans, or British - often made considerable progress in ways of political structures, creating and building city infrastructures, and maintaining civility within the diverse communities. Because of the intricate organization of the empires, they were often able to hold a large majority of power on a universal level.
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Leagues
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Leagues are international organizations composed of states coming together for a single common purpose. In this way, leagues are different from empires, as they only seek to fulfil a single goal. Often leagues are formed on the brink of a military or economic downfall. Meetings and hearings are conducted in a neutral location with representatives of all involved nations present.
Western socio-cultural paradigmatic-centric analysis
The sociological interest in political systems is figuring out who holds power within the relationship between the government and its people and how the government’s power is used. According to
Yale professor Juan José Linz, there are three main types of political systems today:
democracies,
totalitarian regimes and, sitting between these two, authoritarian regimes (with
hybrid regimes).
Another modern classification system includes
monarchies as a standalone entity or as a hybrid system of the main three.
Scholars generally refer to a
dictatorship as either a form of authoritarianism or totalitarianism.
Democracy
Authoritarianism
Totalitarian
Monarchy
Hybrid
Marxist/Dialectical materialistic analysis
19th-century German-born philosopher
Karl Marx analysed that the political systems of "all" state societies are the
dictatorship of one
social class, vying for
its interests
against that of another one; with
which class oppressing
which other class being, in essence, determined by the developmental level of that society, and its repercussions implicated thereof, as the society
through the passage of
time. In
capitalist societies, this characterises as the dictatorship of the
bourgeoisie or
capitalist class, in which the economic and political system is designed to work in their interests collectively as a class, over those of the
proletariat or
working class.
Marx devised this theory by adapting his forerunner-contemporary Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's notion of dialectics into the framework of materialism.
See also
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Political structure
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Polity
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Systems theory in political science
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Tractatus Politicus
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Voting system
Notes
Further reading
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Almond, Gabriel A., et al. Comparative Politics Today: A World View (Seventh Edition). 2000. .
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Ferris, Kerry, and Jill Stein. The Real World An Introduction to Sociology. 3rd ed. New York City: W W Norton & Co, 2012. Print.
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" political system". Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2012. Web. 02 Dec. 2012.
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