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System of politics and government From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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.[1]
It defines the process for making official government decisions. It usually comprizes the governmental legal and economic system, social 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;[2][3] and monarchies may be also included as a standalone entity or as a hybrid system of the main three.[4][5]
According to David Easton, "A political system can be designated as the interactions through which values are authoritatively allocated for a society".[6] Political system refers broadly to the process by which laws are made and public resources allocated in a society, and to the relationships among those involved in making these decisions.[7]
Social anthropologists generally recognize several kinds of political systems, often differentiating between ones that they consider uncentralized and ones they consider centralized.[8]
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 a three main types of political systems today: democracies, totalitarian regimes and, sitting between these two, authoritarian regimes (with hybrid regimes).[3][10] Another modern classification system includes monarchies as a standalone entity or as a hybrid system of the main three.[4] Scholars generally refer to a dictatorship as either a form of authoritarianism or totalitarianism.[11][12][3][13]
A monarchy is a form of government in which a person, the monarch, reigns as head of state for life or until abdication. The extend of the authority of the monarch may vary from restricted and largely symbolic (constitutional monarchy), to fully autocratic (absolute monarchy), and may have representational, executive, legislative, and judicial functions.[28]
The succession of monarchs has mostly been hereditary, often building dynasties. However, monarchies can also be elective and self-proclaimed.[29] Aristocrats, though not inherent to monarchies, often function as the pool of persons from which the monarch is chosen, and to fill the constituting institutions (e.g. diet and court), giving many monarchies oligarchic elements.
The political legitimacy of the inherited, elected or proclaimed monarchy has most often been based on claims of representation of people and land through some form of relation (e.g. kinship) and divine right or other achieved status.A hybrid regime[lower-alpha 1] is a type of political system often created as a result of an incomplete democratic transition from an authoritarian regime to a democratic one (or vice versa).[lower-alpha 2] Hybrid regimes are categorized as having a combination of autocratic features with democratic ones and can simultaneously hold political repressions and regular elections.[lower-alpha 2] Hybrid regimes are commonly found in developing countries with abundant natural resources such as petro-states.[47][37][48] Although these regimes experience civil unrest, they may be relatively stable and tenacious for decades at a time.[lower-alpha 2] There has been a rise in hybrid regimes since the end of the Cold War.[49][50]
The term hybrid regime arises from a polymorphic view of political regimes that opposes the dichotomy of autocracy or democracy.[51] Modern scholarly analysis of hybrid regimes focuses attention on the decorative nature of democratic institutions (elections do not lead to a change of power, different media broadcast the government point of view and the opposition in parliament votes the same way as the ruling party, among others),[52] from which it is concluded that democratic backsliding, a transition to authoritarianism is the most prevalent basis of hybrid regimes.[lower-alpha 2][53] Some scholars also contend that hybrid regimes may imitate a full dictatorship.[54][55]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 progresses 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.
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