Government

• 1. Introduction

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  Government is the system or group of people governing a country and its administrative divisions, generally called a state. The word itself carries a hidden image. It comes from the Greek verb kubernao, meaning to steer with a rudder, a gubernaculum. That metaphor of steering a ship surfaced in the writings of classical antiquity, including Plato's Ship of State. So at the root of the most powerful institution humans build sits a simple picture: someone with a hand on the tiller. But who gets to hold it, and how, has never been settled. Across roughly 200 independent national governments on Earth today, the answers differ wildly. Some leaders inherit power. Others win it in elections. Some rule alone, some as a small elite, some claim to rule on behalf of everyone. How did this phenomenon begin, why do scholars find it so hard to sort governments into neat boxes, and what exactly does a government do once it holds the rudder? Those questions steer everything that follows.

• 2. The First City-States

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  About 5,000 years ago, the first small city-states appeared, though the exact moment and place that human government developed is lost in time. By the third to second millenniums BC, some had grown into larger governed areas: Sumer, ancient Egypt, the Indus Valley civilization, and the Yellow River civilization. History records these formations even though their origins vanished long before any record-keeper.

  Agriculture is one reason offered for why governments emerged at all. Since the Neolithic Revolution, farming has been an efficient way to create a food surplus, which freed people to specialize in non-agricultural activities. Some of those people could rule over others as an external authority. Others ran social experiments with diverse governance models. Both activities formed the basis of governments.

  Density changed everything. As farming populations gathered in larger and denser communities, interactions between groups increased and social pressure rose. The historian David Christian described what happened next in a striking parallel with star formation: new structures suddenly appeared, together with a new level of complexity. In his words, like stars, cities and states reorganize and energize the smaller objects within their gravitational field.

  The need to manage infrastructure offers another explanation. Water infrastructure in particular has historically required centralized administration and complex social organisation, as seen in regions like Mesopotamia. Yet archaeological evidence shows that more egalitarian and decentralized complex societies achieved similar successes, which complicates any single story of why rulers arose.

• 3. The Republican Turn

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  Starting at the end of the 17th century, the prevalence of republican forms of government grew. The English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution in England, the American Revolution, and the French Revolution all contributed to the growth of representative forms of government. The rudder was being pried out of a single pair of hands.

  The Soviet Union became the first large country to have a Communist government, a different experiment in who steers the state. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, liberal democracy has become an even more prevalent form of government. The momentum that began in those revolutions kept moving across centuries.

  Government also grew physically. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there was a significant increase in the size and scale of government at the national level. That expansion included the regulation of corporations and the development of the welfare state, the machinery that would later deliver public services to whole populations.

• 4. Why Labels Fail

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  In political science, it has long been a goal to create a typology or taxonomy of polities, yet the categories refuse to hold still. The boundaries of government classifications are either fluid or ill-defined, because typologies of political systems are not obvious.

  A government's official self-description rarely matches its practice. Every government has a de jure or ideal form: the United States is a federal constitutional republic, while the former Soviet Union was a federal socialist republic. But as the scholars Kopstein and Lichbach argue, defining regimes can be tricky in fact, especially when both the government and the economy deviate from the label. In practice, the Soviet Union was a centralized autocratic one-party state under Joseph Stalin. Voltaire made the same point more sharply, arguing that the Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.

  Words cross borders and change meaning. The meaning of conservatism in the United States has little in common with how the word is used elsewhere. As Ribuffo notes, what Americans now call conservatism much of the world calls liberalism or neoliberalism, and a conservative in Finland would be labelled 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. During the era of segregation, though, many Southern Democrats were conservatives who helped form the conservative coalition that controlled Congress from 1937 to 1963.

  Shades of gray are commonplace in any classification. Even the most liberal democracies limit rival political activity to some extent, while the most tyrannical dictatorships must organize a broad base of support. Some critics call the United States a plutocracy rather than a democracy, since some voters believe elections are manipulated by wealthy Super PACs. That ambiguity is exactly why a government's quality must be measured rather than assumed, through tools like the Government effectiveness index, which relates to political efficacy and state capacity.

• 5. Plato To Hobbes

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  Plato, in The Republic of 375 BC, divided governments into five basic types, four existing and one ideal that exists only in speech. He named aristocracy as rule by law and order, like a benevolent kingdom. Then came timocracy, rule by honor and duty, with Sparta as his example. Oligarchy was rule by wealth and market-based ethics. Democracy was rule by pure liberty and equality. Tyranny was rule by fear, like a despot. These five regimes progressively degenerate, starting with aristocracy at the top and ending with tyranny at the bottom.

  Aristotle, in his Politics, reworked Plato's five regimes by asking a simpler question: how many people hold the authority to rule? From that follows a classification by number. One person produces an autocracy, such as monarchy. A select group produces an aristocracy. The people as a whole produce a democracy, such as a republic.

  Thomas Hobbes reached the same arithmetic of one, few, or all. He argued that the difference of Commonwealths consists in the difference of the sovereign. Sovereignty, he wrote, is either in one man or in an assembly. When the representative is one man, the Commonwealth is a monarchy. When it is an assembly of all who come together, it is a democracy. When it is an assembly of a part only, it is an aristocracy. In his view there can be no other kind, for either one, or more, or all must have the sovereign power entire.

• 6. Who Holds Power

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  Yale professor Juan Jose Linz identified three main types of political systems today: democracies, totalitarian regimes, and, sitting between them, authoritarian regimes with hybrid forms. Another modern system adds monarchies as a standalone entity or as a hybrid of the main three. Scholars generally treat a dictatorship as either authoritarianism or totalitarianism.

  Autocracy concentrates supreme power in the hands of one person, whose decisions face neither external legal restraints nor regular popular control, except perhaps the implicit threat of a coup d'etat or mass insurrection. Absolute monarchy is its historically prevalent form, where a monarch governs with no limitation on royal prerogative. Most absolute monarchies are hereditary, but some are elected, notably the Holy See, chosen by an electoral college such as the college of cardinals.

  Aristocracy places power in a small, elite ruling class, such as a hereditary nobility or privileged caste. This minority rule often takes the shape of a landed timocracy, a wealthy plutocracy, or an oligarchy. Many monarchies were aristocracies, though in modern constitutional monarchies the monarch may have little effective power.

  Democracy hands power to citizens through voting and deliberation. In a direct democracy, the citizenry forms a participatory governing body and votes directly on each issue. In an indirect democracy, the citizenry governs through representatives chosen typically by election, or less commonly by sortition. A constitutional democracy limits even majority rule, usually by guaranteeing certain universal rights such as freedom of speech or freedom of association.

• 7. How States Are Built

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  A republic treats the country as a public matter, a res publica, not the private property of its rulers. Offices of state are elected or appointed rather than inherited, and a common simplified definition is a government where the head of state is not a monarch. Montesquieu counted both democracies and aristocracies as republican forms, which is why labels like parliamentary republic, presidential republic, federal republic, people's republic, and Islamic republic all coexist.

  Federalism divides sovereignty constitutionally between a central authority and constituent units called states or provinces. Built on democratic principles, it shares the power to govern between national and provincial governments, creating what is often called a federation, and its supporters are called federalists.

  Branches divide power inside the state. Governments are often organised into three branches with separate powers: a legislature, an executive, and a judiciary, sometimes called the trias politica model. An independent distribution of powers between branches is the separation of powers, while a shared or overlapping one is the fusion of powers, as in parliamentary and semi-presidential systems. Some governments add branches, such as an independent electoral commission.

  Parties run the machinery. Most governments are administered by an explicitly constituted political party, and in a multiparty system several parties can win office through elections. A majority government holds an absolute majority of parliamentary seats, while a minority government holds only a plurality and often depends on a confidence-and-supply arrangement. A coalition government joins multiple parties under a coalition agreement. Democracy remains the most popular form, counted at 97 of 167 nations as of 2021, even as a quarter of the world's population lives under democratically backsliding governments.

• 8. What Government Delivers

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  Governmental property, state-owned enterprises, public services, civil servants, and government employees together compose the public sector of the economy. In modern developed countries, public services often include courts, education, electricity, emergency services, environmental protection, health care, mail, military, policing, public transportation, water supply, and waste management, among many others.

  In developing countries, those services tend to be much less well developed. Water services, for instance, might reach only the wealthy middle class. For political reasons the service is often subsidized, which reduces the finance available to expand into poorer communities. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 5 aims to influence the provision of public services and infrastructure for marginalized demographics.

  The theory caught up in the mid-twentieth century. That era saw the rise of German sociologist Max Weber's theory of bureaucracy, which sparked substantive interest in the theoretical aspects of public administration. Public policy, meanwhile, can be considered the sum of a government's direct and indirect activities across education, health care, employment, finance, transportation, and more.

  Money ties it all together. Government spending covers social protection, publicly funded health care, general public services, education, economic affairs, public security, defense, recreation, and culture. The government budget balance affects government bond yields, and for some countries current budget balances and unfunded mandates have been found unsustainable, the long-term fiscal gap that any hand on the rudder must eventually answer for.