Government

Government as an Institution

In a strict sense, the government (usually with the article) refers to the authoritative expression of the state and describes the group of persons that has authority in a given unit at a certain time. This governing community is opposed to the governed people. In non–Anglo-Saxon languages, government has an even more limited meaning because it refers precisely to the institution that exerts executive power within the political system, for example, the Italian government of Silvio Berlusconi. In many countries, executives possess two authorities: the government and the head of state (president or monarch). This restrictive definition of government thus corresponds to the British term cabinet or the American expression administration.

When understood as the center of power, the government exists in the majority of human communities, with the exception of some primitive tribes. Indeed, the institutionalization of government as a complex organization separated from the rest of society appeared alongside the division of social work in industrial countries. This development was parallel to the expansion of the administration within Western states during the nineteenth century. Since this period, bureaucracy has progressively been ruled by hierarchical principles, written procedures, and meritocracy. The activities of the administrative apparatus of governments grew dramatically during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. New ministries appeared (environment, welfare), and expenditure and taxation levels increased. Whatever the type of political regime considered, the government expressed the sovereignty of the state by exercising its sole right to legitimately use force in a specific territory. As a result, the government regulates internal order by imposing behavioral norms, values, and rules between individuals. It also controls external relations between states by defining a certain type of relationship with foreign governments.

Types of government have also undergone evolution since the nineteenth century. Classical thinkers such as Aristotle have usually classified political regimes in three categories: monarchy, where one person exerts power; aristocracy, where a minority rules society; and democracy, where the whole people govern. However, as Aristotle underlined, these three forms of government can degenerate into three types of negative regime when rulers do not consider the well-being of the polis. Monarchy degenerates into tyranny, aristocracy transforms into oligarchy, and democracy deteriorates into demagogy.

Today, cleavages between types of government tend to concern the extension of governmental power with respect to citizens, rather than the number of rulers. In this way, liberal constitutional governments are commonly opposed to authoritarian governments.

The liberal constitutional category, which is still a minority group at the international level, can be divided into two subcategories corresponding to two forms of government. The first one comprises republican regimes where the head of state is an elected politician (e.g., the United States of America and France). The second one encompasses constitutional monarchies where the head of state is a hereditary monarch (case of the United Kingdom and Spain). Depending on the degree of concentration of power within a single institution of government, these regimes are said to be presidential (the president is the central piece of the institutional system such as in the United States) or parliamentary-cabinet governments (the cabinet is composed by members of the parliament from one or different parties as in the United Kingdom). In addition, depending on the relationship between territorial levels of government, political systems can be divided into federal regimes (United States) and unitary regimes (France).

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