OromianEconomist

Government types & the way they work February 5, 2015

A government is the system by which a state or community is governed.^[1] In the Commonwealth of Nations, the wordgovernment is also used more narrowly to refer to the collective group of people that exercises executive authority in a state.^[2][3][4] This usage is analogous to what is called an “administration” in American English. Furthermore,government is occasionally used in English as a synonym for governance.

In the case of its broad associative definition, government normally consists of legislators, administrators, andarbitrators. Government is the means by which state policy is enforced, as well as the mechanism for determining thepolicy of the state. A form of government, or form of state governance, refers to the set of political systems and institutions that make up the organisation of a specific government.

In political science, it has long been a goal to create a typology or taxonomy of polities, as typologies of political systems are not obvious.^[6] It is especially important in the political science fields of comparative politics and international relations.

On the surface, identifying a form of government appears to be easy, as all governments have an official form. The United States is a federal republic, while the former Soviet Union was a socialist republic. However self-identification is not objective, and as Kopstein and Lichbach argue, defining regimes can be tricky.^[7] For example, elections are a defining characteristic of a democracy,^{[citation needed]} but in practice elections in the former Soviet Union were not “free and fair” and took place in a single party state. Thus in many practical classifications it would not be considered democratic.

Identifying a form of government is also complicated because a large number of political systems originate as socio-economic movements and are then carried into governments by specific parties naming themselves after those movements; all with competing political-ideologies. Experience with those movements in power, and the strong ties they may have to particular forms of government, can cause them to be considered as forms of government in themselves. Read more at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government