The Science of Everything Podcast - Episode 30: Systems of Government

Episode Date: February 24, 2012

An overview of the various forms of government that have existed throughout history and across the world, including a discussion of anarchy, democracy, monarchy, autocracy, and various forms of oligarchy, giving some key characteristics and important examples of each. Also includes an introduction to the principles of classification and political comparison. If you enjoyed the podcast please consider supporting the show by making a paypal donation or becoming a patreon supporter. https://www.patreon.com/jamesfodor https://www.paypal.me/ScienceofEverything

You're listening to The Science of Everything podcast, episode 30. Systems of Government. In this episode, I'm going to look at the different systems of government that are used in various countries, either throughout history or currently in the world, and discuss the various sources of power and means of exercising that power. The type of systems I look at include the various types of democracies, oligarchies, dictatorships, monarchies, autocracies, and so on. This is my first episode on political science,

and I thought that this would be a good one to start off with because it sort of sets a basis for the different basic types of governments that exist, and governments are obviously a very important topic in political science, so it seems a good thing to start off with. So first of all, before I get into the classifications of different sources of governmental power, we need to look at what is a government or what makes up government. Now this is a controversial and complicated topic, but basically for the purposes of this episode, we can consider government to be a body of people and associated organizations that control a state. Now, a state is also a controversial subject, so for our purposes, we'll take a simplification that a state is basically a country, be it small or large, so Russia is a state, Zimbabwe is a state, USA is a state, and so on. So a government is the body of people and the associated organizations that control a given state or country. A government makes laws, interprets the laws, enforces the laws, maintains order, sets policies,

arbitrates internal conflicts and does that sort of thing. So a government includes, you know, the prime minister or the president or the monarch or the dictator or whoever, the parliament, if there is one, the ruling party, and also things like the military, the police, court system, civil servants, all of that is part of the government. So it refers both to particular people and also to a sort of a generic concept of an institutional structure. There's one other important distinction to make between a government and the government. A particular government refers to a particular set of people and perhaps a party that is governing a state country at a particular time. So you might have governments are sometimes named after people like Hitler's government in Nazi Germany or Bush's government in the USA, for example.

Or they might be named after the political parties, the socialist government or the left-wing government or something like that. the communist government. That is a particular structure and group of people with a set of policies and ideals and whatever that are governing a country at a particular time. The government is a broader concept which refers to the institutions of government as a whole, regardless of who in particular or what individuals or parties are exercising those powers and inhabiting those institutions at that particular time. So, for example, the government of the US stays the same, regardless of who is president or what party controls Congress and so on, there is a federal government as a whole, which then is sort of controlled or taken over periodically in a sense, or taken control of by a given political

party or individual president, which is then referred to as a particular government. Another example might be. Maybe you talk about the government of China, which was originally an imperial government, then there was a revolution, and then you had a Republican government, and then later on there was a civil war, and you had a communist government. So those were particular governments, be it imperial, Republican, or communists, but throughout the whole period, well, more or less you had a concept of the Chinese government, the overall federal structure that was governing the area we roughly call China and the associated institutions and structures and so on. So there is a distinction between those two. So in this episode,

we're really talking about the government as a whole, not a particular government. We're talking about broad conceptions of different ways of governing countries, not particular policies or the individual choices of this president or that political party or something like that. Okay, so having to find government will now have a quick word on classification and how we're going to deal with that, because obviously classifying political systems or social systems or economic systems is difficult because there's a lot of overlap and imprecise, imprecision and so on. So each government is unique in many aspects, but there are also certain common features and attributes which we can use to group states into rough, fuzzy, overlapping classes, but still useful categorizations.

There are many different ways to do this, so there's no one right way of classifying governments or political systems. There are different ways which may be more or less useful for a given purpose or a given context. So some of these different classification systems could include the de juro political status or the de facto political practice of the nation. Dejuro means by law, like what's written down in the constitution or whatever, the factor means what actually happens. So de jure, you could be democracy, but de facto, it could be dictatorship, for example. You could classify nations by either of those two situations. You could also classify them by the degree of democratic freedom or the degree of centralization of political

power versus decentralization to local governments, the size of the state or the government, degree of repression, and so on. In this episode, though, we're going to focus on the type and extent of political power. So that's sort of who holds the power, how the power is exercised, the power of government and the degree to which the government exercises power or intervention in the state or society as a whole. This is perhaps the most basic way of categorizing governments. In later episodes, we'll look at, say, degree of democratic freedom or centralization of political power and issue of federalism, which is sort of more specialized issues. This is the most broad classification of governments just by type and extent of power, basically. Okay, so let's get on to the actual

classification. There are five broad classification categories that I've put into this episode. There are different ways you could do it. Once again, this is not the single right way. These are anarchy, democracy, oligarchy, monarchy, and autocracy. And within each of those, there's a number of subcategories, which can be rather different from each other. But in each of those five broad categories, there are overall similarities. Oh, just a note of terminology. Basically, archie or crassie, that suffix there is, is derived from the Greek, which basically means like rule or or power or something like that. The word itself refers that each of the category titles gives you a clue as to what type of power it is or how it's exercise. So anarchy, a

narque, which is basically A meaning the absence or lack of. So anarchy is the absence of power or the absence of control and means essentially lack of government. You might think that anarchy is anarchy. There's no real distinction there, but there are actually different forms of anarchy or at least forms of lack of government that I've categorized, which I'll talk about. Those are relatively rare in history because they tend to be unstable and replaced by some more more centralized government. Next one is democracy. This is Demo referring to the people and Crassie's sort of rule, power. So rule by the people basically is what democracy means.

And there are a couple of types of that. That's historically been rather rare, but obviously much more common in, say, the 19th to 20th centuries. Most nations nowadays are dejuro, that is, by law, democracies, but in practice the degree of actual democratic engagement and freedom of speech and so on differs. Next one is oligarchy. So, Oli, meaning a few or a small number, and garky power. So oligarchy basically means rule by the few. Not by the one, but by the few. So oligarchy is sort of halfway in between democracy and monarchy, which I'll talk about in the second.

Democracy is ruled by many, or ruled by the people, monarchy, or a dictatorship is ruled by one. Oligarchy is ruled by a few people, so it can include where there's a single ruling party in power or when a small elite governs and so on. Well, we'll go through those different categories. There are many different types of oligarchy. The next category that I've already alluded to is monarchy, mono meaning one anarchy, rule power, so basically rule by the one is what monarchy means, or rule by a single person. That has been the most common method of rule or form of government throughout history.

Relatively rare nowadays, though. The final category that I have is autocracy, which also sort of meaning self, grassy rules, so basically rule by self or self-power. Rule derived from, it's a little bit hard to exactly get the sense of this one. Monarchy is often classified as a type of autocracy, but I've separated them out because I think there's enough of a distinction there to warrant a distinction. Autocracy is basically the other forms of single-person rule than are not monarchies. So they include things like military rule and dictatorships and so on, authoritarian and totalitarian states, which I'll talk about. So that's the five broad categories in order of basically going from less central control to more central control.

Anarchy, democracy, oligarchy, and autocracy. Just to give you a broad overview. All right, so starting back in an anarchy, I'm going to go through. through the subcategories and give some examples of states that fit into these specific categories and talk about some of their attributes. So first of all, Oclocracy. I may pronounce that wrong. It's spelled O-C-H-L-O-Cressy. This is rule by the mob. Broad government structure. It's an important sort of category or concept to know about. So an oclocracy could be an actual rule by a mob or intimidation of legitimate authorities by a mob. Generally, especially with herd behavior,

irrationality, madness of crowds, that sort of thing. It's a problem. It's a problem. form of government because it's highly unstable and often gives rise to autocracies or other less savoury forms of government. It's also at the risk of tyrannies of the majority, poor decision-making, hasty decision-making's oppression of minority groups, retributive justice, like lynchings and that sort of thing. Once again, seldom that a state for any significant period of time is governed by a noclococracy. But it is an important concept because we can use to understand situations like black lynchings, for example, in the southern US. I mean, lynchings happen in many places, but this is just an example that people are familiar with in the southern US, say 19th, early 20th century.

Say them which trial back in 17th century, or which trials in many places in Europe around the same time as well, would be another example. Many peasant and worker revolts throughout history, especially in places like China or throughout medieval Europe, perhaps slave revolts as well. But especially peasant and worker revolts in the 19th century of Europe would be another example. It could also be categorized as ruled by the mob. Once again, often not for very long, but the mob can, can, be a catalyst towards, say, a revolution or a change in power or something like that. So that's not exactly a form of government because it's really the least organized, the most chaotic form of governments or a-governments that there is. But it's important to know.

So next subcategor I'm going to talk about is isocracy, which ISO meaning equal, so sort of equal rule or equal power is what isocracy means. Rule by equals. This is where all citizens have equal political power. I don't really know of any examples of this, nor do I really can say how it would work in practice. I just included. for completeness. Now I'm going to talk about the third top category, Libertarian Socialism. So this sounds like socialism, which is I've actually put in the autocracy category, or can sometimes be in the democracy category, depending on what type of socialism it is. By the way, don't worry too much about what socialism is if you don't know what it is, because we'll probably have a whole

episode on socialism and communism, because that's a very important topic. But socialism is basically concerned with equality of various sorts, political and economic. But anyway, libertarian socialism is not the same thing as socialism, so don't get too confused. Libertarian socialism is basically a form of anarchism. It's non-hierarchical, non-bureaucratic, stateless society without private property. So generally the government's in a libertarian socialist country or state occurs through decentralized direct democracy, so people voting directly on sort of councils, things like citizens assemblies, through trade unions, workers councils, that sort of thing. So this is not the same as a clockcrasy. It's not like absence of rule or total mob rule or something like that. There are

institutions, but they're localized and decentralized and voluntary. So as I said, things like citizens assemblies or trade unions or a local council or something like that. And people voluntarily turn up and directly engage with that sort of rule. So these sort of countries tend to be unstable. None have lasted for very long. But there are some examples in history. So the Israeli kibbutz, for example, I think there are a few of those around today, but they are more popular around the 60s and 70s.

Basically small socialist communities that existed in Israel. A few hundred people, generally agricultural communities. Once again, that were voluntary and had decentralized direct democratic decision-making and so on. The Paris commune that existed in 1870 for a couple of months in Paris. It was sort of like a revolutionary state that was run by workers' councils and trade unions and so on. It didn't last very long. There were a couple of other examples as well, the free territory in the Ukraine that existed in the early 1920s, I think around the time of the Russian Revolution before it was invaded by, I'm not exactly sure who invaded, probably the Soviet Union.

That was once again a significant area of the Ukraine which was governed by Citizens' Assemblies or farmers associations, workers' councils and that sort of thing, with no real central government. And Revolutionary Catalonia, which was a section of Spain. They existed for a couple of years during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, which once again was run along libertarian socialist lines with decentralized local direct democratic rule and absence of private property. Most of those don't last very long, and neither did any of these states, the Free Territory, Paris Commune or Revolutionalonia, lasts a very long, because they tend to be invaded by an external power, basically,

and they tend to arise in sort of revolutionary, unstable circumstances. Okay, so that's libertarian socialism, and the final case of anarchy that I want to talk about is anarcho-capitalism. So anarcho-capitalism is sort of associated with libertarian socialism because they're both forms of anarchism, like political philosophies. There's no political philosophy associated with alquocracy or rule by the mob. That's the total absence of any rule. But libertarian socialism and anarcho-capitalism both have ideologies

or political schools of thought associated with them. But anarcho-capitalism disagrees with libertarian socialism, basically on the role of private property. So, anarcho-capitalist states are sort of direct democratic in some sense, individual sovereignty, decentralized, like libertarian socialism, but one big difference is that they have private property. In fact, the general idea of anarcho-capitalism is that everything, including state, law enforcement, courts, money, roads,

everything you would normally associate with the state is actually provided through private contract and monetary transactions. So, I mean, the big risk of this sort of state is how long a society would be able to last before some powerful individual law company or family or something like that establish their own government through force. So if you have competing law enforcement agencies contracting with individuals or principalities or like local areas or whatever to provide law enforcement or legal judicial facilities and so on, as prisons and so on, as anarcho-capitals will argue, that may work, but the question is how long will it work before one of them becomes more powerful than the others

and just decides to take over through force. So perhaps because of this sort of risk of a de facto state, perhaps a monarchy or something being set up in the state of an anarcho-capitalist society, this sort of government is really rare throughout history. It hasn't really ever existed in its proper form. But there have been a couple of societies or areas which have been argued to have exhibited many characteristics of anarcho-capitalism. The two common examples are medieval Iceland around the 11th, 12th centuries, where, so law, judicial services, also many things like land and so on, were traded with money and through voluntary transactions and so on. So it was very commercial in that sense, but still voluntary without this overarching government

to impose any of its laws on people. So that was considered to be sort of a proto-anaco-capitalist regime or society by some people. Another example that's sometimes given is the American Old West around the 19th century, where once again there was a large absence of central authority and justice law and currency and so on and any other goods and services too were provided on a voluntary basis by monetary transactions between individuals or groups and so on. Okay, so that's anarchy. So just to recap the different classes, occlocracy, rule by mob, isocracy, theoretical rule by equals, then you've got libertarian socialism and anarcho-capitalism. All of those forms of anarchy are quite rare and generally don't turn up

too much, but need to be understood because they are important classes of states and something that people sometimes reference. Okay, moving on to the next category now, democracy. Now there are two basic types of democracy, direct democracy and representative democracy, or also called a republic. Direct democracy is when people vote directly on policy initiatives and they are involved directly with decision making. Sometimes they also sit directly on courts or like act directly as judges. So instead of having a judge and or jury, a direct democracy might have a very large group of people, a group of citizens deciding a case directly. This is what happened in ancient Greece, for example. So, you know, you might have a large group in a direct democracy, you have a large group of people,

or perhaps everyone being able to cast a vote for passing executive decisions, making laws, or electing or dismissing officials, conducting trials and that sort of thing. It's very difficult to apply direct democracy. I don't know if there are any examples of this, to apply it in a large heterogeneous state, like the US or China or India, for example, because it's just too hard to manage logistically, and the more people you have, it's harder to make decisions, get all the votes in, and so on. And the more heterogeneous issue are, the more the state is, the more disagreements and problems you tend to have, which can lead to inability to make effective and rapid decisions. But this has been, direct democracy has and is applied successfully in relatively small states.

So, for example, ancient Athens had a direct democracy. So remember, most states nowadays are republics or representative democracies. People often associate democracy with Athens or ancient Greece, because Athens wasn't the only democratic city state in Greece, but it's, the canonical example. People often associate Athens with democracy, but the democracy that they had was direct democracy, which is very different to representative or Republican democracy, which is what most states in the world now have. So that is an important distinction to draw. So some other examples of direct democracy includes Switzerland, not so much on the national level, but especially at local level. Switzerland is very decentralized, and their political system differs

between the different cantons, which are like states and local councils and so on. There's lot of complexity there, if you want to read more into it, which we don't have time to get into in this episode, but there is a large element and large degree of direct democracy in Switzerland. And also, some states and counties in the United States have a large element of direct democracy. For example, in California, they're often voting, like there's a public side of popular vote on a particular law or proposal that's put forward. That is an example of direct democracy. So, once again, direct democracy is often something that is not completely adhered to in the pure sense, but elements of it are present to a greater or less degree in various states.

but once again it does tend to be rare because it's hard to apply in large, larger states. So the second form of democracy, which I've been mentioning, is representative democracy or a republic. So in this, the people do not directly vote on things or do not directly appoint individuals or do not directly conduct trials. The only thing they do is basically vote on the government or vote on their representatives and perhaps, you know, they might discuss political issues in the media and so on, or they may lobby and talk to their representatives, but they do not govern directly themselves.

So government itself is directed by the people through their chosen representatives, or at least a significant portion of the people. There are many examples of Republican government, so many classical Greek city states also had this form of government. The Roman Republic was a, well, had elements of direct democracy, but was also what was called a republic in the sense that it had elected representative officials.

Renaissance, Italian city states, in say the 15th, 16th centuries, that sort of period. Many of those were republics. Hanseatic League, basically those were sort of Scandinavian, northern German city states, similar to the Italian city states. The Dutch Republic, in around like 17th, 18th centuries, was a representative government. The United States of America and most other modern democratic states are republics in the sense that they're representative democracies.

And there are many sub-times of representative democracies, parliamentary, presidential, semi-presidential, and some other hybrid mixed systems. But that is a sort of a, there's a whole sort of subfield of research, which involves comparing parliamentary to presidential systems. So parliamentary systems, kind of like what they have in Britain and many other European countries where you have a parliament and a prime minister. Presidential system is what they have in the US and many other Latin American countries where you don't have a prime minister, but you have a president and then a parliament,

which is sort of separate from the president. But I won't go into the details of those now, because as I said, there's a whole lot of theory and research related to that. But they are both subtypes of a republic, a representative democracy, which are both distinct from the direct democracy. And republics have been relatively rare throughout history until around the 19th century. Mostly before then, they were just, as you might have seen from my examples,

relatively small city-states or small republics, because then any larger areas tended to be too hard to aggregate individual, to aggregate, say, votes and things like that together to form a stable representative system. before the development of more modern technologies, which have permitted mass representative states. And now the Republic is the most common political system in the world. Okay, so that's all the democracies covered. Now we're going to move on to oligarchies, which is ruled by the few, or a small elite,

but that elite can be different between different countries. There are many types of oligarchies, and they're quite a common, quite common throughout history, and still relatively common today. The first one I want to talk about is aristocracy, or plutarchy. Now, aristocracy technically means my rule by the best or rule by the excellent, and Plutanki technically means rule by the rich, but generally they're more or less the same thing. So an aristocracy is often an elite upper class, wealthy, landed gentry or something like that. Plutarche, just rich people.

They could be businessmen or landowners or whoever. So I'm grouping this together. Aristocracy and Plutarchie is basically the same thing. It's ruled by a small number of elite, wealthy individuals. So aristocracies of plutarchies can be stable, but they can also suffer from internal power struggles between the wealthy individuals, which can eventually lead to them becoming monarchy's or autocracies, depending on how it goes. Or sometimes an aristocracy can be a sort of a stepping stone onto becoming a more democratic state, which is kind of what happened in a lot of European states.

They start off as more centralized or were at least centralized at one period of time and then became more of an aristocracy, Plutarchie, and then eventually became a democracy as the power became spread across more and more of the population. So there are many examples of aristocracies. Many ancient and medieval city-states and republics were in practice aristocracies. That is, by law, perhaps, or technically everyone had a vote, or every citizen had a vote. But in practice, say, a Roman Republic is a good example of this. In practice, a small wealthy elite really controlled things.

Medieval feudal states and also the Tokungawa Shogunate and the Zhou Dynasty in China, which was around the middle of the first millennium BC, so quite. a while ago. Tokungawa Shogunate is like 16th century, Japan, around then, 17th century. 18th century England as well was a Plutaki aristocracy with the rule by a small elite of the aristocracy and so on as the power was moving away from the king towards the England becoming more democratic in the, say, 19th century. But going back to the medieval feudal states, so most of the feudal states you think of in medieval Europe, you know, England, France, Spain, Germany, those sort of places where you had the knights and the Lords of

above them and the barons and then the king and the peasants below them all and so on. This is an example of aristocracy, because although they had, most of them had kings by law, in practice, most power was decentralized to a small elite of landed gentry, who were the nobles and the knights and so on. So that was very common in medieval Europe, but as I said, it also existed in Japan during the Tokungal period, in China, in the Jodian, some other periods as well, and it's existed in various other states throughout history, which had been more or less feudal. Okay, so that's an aristocracy or plutarchy.

The next one I want to talk about is a technocracy, which is my personal favorite of all the political systems. Technology meaning rule by experts. Now, this is where decision makers are selected based upon how knowledgeable and skillful they are in their particular technical field, or their field of expertise, to be effective decision makers and policy makers and so on. In practice, it would be the government or state is ruled by scientists,

engineers, economists, maybe some judges and legal issues and so on. So people who are experts in their particular fields. This form of government is relatively rare in history. It's never existed in its pure form. Basically, you have governments, you don't have any government that has been manifestly technocratic. I don't think any government's self-described, has self-described itself as technocratic, largely because these sort of states face severe legitimacy problems. Because these experts tend not to be, well, they're, they're obviously not democratic,

so they can't appeal to legitimacy there. But they also can't appeal to legitimacy based on, like, divine right, or based simply on brute force or wealth of the people ruling as an aristocracy. or a monarchy or even a military state can. The experts are not military leaders or people who have the most money in most cases. So that's perhaps why these sort of states tend to be rare. It's that there's very little prospect for them coming about unless some existing state decides to become technocratic in the way they govern.

And so that's generally why you have some states that are lean towards technocratic but are not pure technocratic. So technology was influential in the West during the Great Depression because it was perceived that the more, perhaps populist or the more, more representative form of democracy, the traditional form had failed, and there was more need for intervention by experts. Also, at Chile in the early 1970s under Allende, who was normally a socialist, but his socialist regime was particularly technocratic in the way they went about things or sort of began to go about things. They even had a control centre that they set up. I don't think

it was ever used because they were kicked out of power quite early, but where you had a whole bunch of computer systems hooked up to receiving information from factories and other industries all over the country with the swivel chairs for easy decision-making and planning and so on, sort of very sci-fi-looking. So that's probably perhaps the best example of a technocratic government, L.A. Lendez Chile. Other socialist governments throughout the 20th century have also been more or less technocratic in the way that they talk about, you know, central planning and experts making decisions on. The modern Chinese government, the Comtex government in China, is also sometimes referred to as technocratic because many of the top people have engineering or science backgrounds

and there's an emphasis in the state on planning, carefully planning of overall economic and infrastructure objectives and pursuing science and that sort of thing. Technology actually doesn't have to be socialist-oriented, though. There are other examples of mine include where Western economic experts and especially economists, but other experts as well were hired to restructure the Soviet states, say, Russia and Poland and so on after they were, after communism collapse and they were reforming. So those sort of early transitional governments could be more or less described as technocratic, perhaps. All right, so that's technocracy. Next is a crittarchy, rule by judges.

This is a sort of an obscure form of government, but it's an interesting one to consider. This is when a relatively small number of judicial experts or judges governs according to pre-existing laws. So the key aspect of a crittarchy is that they don't generally make new, or they interpret old law and govern according to pre-existing customary law. Sometimes statutory law, so sometimes it's written down, but often is customary. So the two examples of this are most familiar with are the rule of judges in ancient Israel. So you know, you've got the book of judges in the Bible. That was during the period when Israel was run by a bunch of judges, legal experts who applied

existing law. Another example is the Islamic Courts Union in Mon Somalia, particularly around, I think, 2006, a couple of years back. The Islamic Courts Union had a lot of power. They controlled a fair bit of Somalia. I don't think they're as powerful anymore, but basically they run their area. a bunch of judges or Islamic legal scholars who ran their area according to their interpretation of customary Somalian plus Islamic law.

Countries that are run more or less according to Sharia law, that is Islamic law, can sort of be described as critteris as well because the more solidly they adhere to strict Islamic law or interpretation of Islamic law, then the more influence and control judges will have Islamic scholars and so on will have over the political power. but most countries that nowadays that are controlled, and even historically, that are so-called under Sharia law, there's still a great deal of discretionary power or overall control by an elite or overall arching government,

imperial or nationalistic or whatever, or socialist sometimes, which is separate from the Islamic scholars. So just, in other ways, just because the country says it's, you know, operating according to Sharia law, doesn't mean it's a crittarchy, because often that's not completely so. The next one I want to talk about is a diarchy, which is basically the same as a monarchy,

except instead of having one rule, you have two rulers, hence die. Diarchy rule by two. Usually diarchs hold their position for life and pass their responsibilities onto their children or other family members when they die. So diarchy can be a stable political system in certain situations whereby you basically

keep one monarch in, keep the state in check from the excesses or idiosyncrasies of a single rule by having two rules simultaneously. There are a number of examples of this. The Roman Republic was a diarchy because you had two consuls who were, had equal power and were in office simultaneously.

Classical Sparta as well had two monarchs, well, two monarchs, so it was a diarchy, which were hereditary. A number of different medieval and early modern European states were dual monarchies, where basically you had, often it was the king and his queen at the same time, were both the reigning monarchs at a given time. Perhaps one of the most common examples of this was Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. One was originally the queen of part of Spain, the other was Frederick, the king of the other part of Spain and they married each other to unite the Spain into a single kingdom. This is a common cause of dual monarchies or diarchies in, particularly in early modern

Europe, which was basically two monarch, already powerful monarchs marrying each other to unite their states into a single more powerful entity. Modern Andorra and Swaziland, is a small state in southern Africa, are also diarches. Diakis still does this as a state. Relatively rare in history though, but still an interesting one to note. Next category of oligarchia, I want to to talk about is the single party state. This is a relatively recent phenomenon, basically dating to the 19th century, late 19th century, but it was very popular during the early to mid-20th century, and still exists today in a number of places. So a single-party state is where a single-political party forms a government and no other political parties are allowed to run candidates for election.

So sometimes they still hold elections in single-party states. They do this, for example, in the Soviet Union, but only the governing parties are allowed to run candidates. And so you might have a ballot with only one candidate on it, which is not really much point. And other times they don't hold elections at all in single-party states. But the key thing about a single-party state is that often, especially if it's a true oligarchy, there's no single one all-powerful ruler who controls the government. It's government is controlled by a small elite that exists within the political party, so a small top echelon of the political party, and they're associated, you know, cadres and civil servants and so on.

Sometimes small opposition parties or subsidiary coalition parties are permitted to exist, but there are of no particular significance to the, uh, actual governance of the country. 19th century Liberia, Liberia is a small country in Africa, was perhaps the first example of a single-party state because it was dominated by a single-party for like 80 years or something like that. But there are lots of examples in the 20th century, including a lot of nationalist, fascist or socialist regimes.

So, for example, Nazi Germany was a single-party state, most communist countries are single-party states, Italy under Mussolini is a single-party state, many African and Latin American and Southeast Asian countries after independence were single-party states to various degrees. So a single party states, a very broad category, because you can also have dictatorships, which are a single party states, because you can have a dictator who establishes a political party to sort of augment or assist his rule. In this particular, the reason I've categorized the single party state is an oligarchies, because to highlight the states where they are not ruled by a single dictator, but are ruled by a political party, so a small elite at the top of the political party. A good example of this would be contemporary China, which is controlled by the Communist Party, but there's no single, I mean, they have a single,

headmost leader, but they're not completely in control, and they can be deposed or replaced every so often nowadays. Vietnam would be another example. So it's really the political party and a small elite within that that control the state, not a single individual. So there are a few of those existing today. I mentioned Vietnam and China. There's also Turkmenistan, Syria, Laos, and Cuba, a single-party state. Much more common nowadays, though, is the next and final subcategory of oligarchy, which I'll talk about is the dominant party staff. obviously quite similar to a single-party state. Basically, a dominant party state is a nominally democratic country

that has multiple political parties and regular elections. So in a dominant party state, you have to have multiple legal political parties and they have to be regular elections. But they do not have to be fair elections, which is a key thing. So in a dominant party state, there are various laws or practices, so they could be de jiro or de facto, which prevent the opposition parties from actually obtaining political power, actually exercising very much influence in the governance of the country.

So the opposition parties still exist. They are still legal, and they're still, you know, they can be significant in size, not like the tiny irrelevant ones that sometimes exist in a single-party state. And they can sometimes get, you know, a decent chunk of the votes, 20, 30%, but they'll never win the election, and they'll never excise a significant amount of power. They can excise a bit of power, you know, they can introduce a bill in Parliament every now and again or whatever, but they never really gain control of the country. So dominant party states, a step down, a step towards democracy from a single-party state,

but it's still not a full representative democracy, because it's not completely fair and free and so on. This is very common throughout the 20th century. It's still probably the most common form of government in the world today. As I said, most governments are now de Juro, that is, by law, democracies, republics, specifically. But in practice, there's often a dominant political party. This is the form of government that exists in Russia nowadays, and so that's why Putin gets a lot of criticism within Russia, because his party, I think it's United Russia, really dominates the political system, but there are still other political parties that get a fair number of votes. and perhaps soon elections, there'll be enough pressure so that the dominant party state actually becomes a real democracy.

Many Latin American countries in the late 19th and 20th centuries and also various African and Asian countries throughout the 20th century following your independence were dominant party states where you had theoretical elections, but in practice one party dominated. The Kuomintang in, or Kuomindang, have you pronounced it, in Taiwan, in Taiwan throughout most of the 20th century, up until a few couple of decades ago, was a dominant party system. People's Action Party in Singapore is a really good example of that, which still governs Singapore today. So you have elections in Singapore. I think relatively fair, actually, based on external observers, but still, it's dominated by the People's Action Party, no other political parties that are completely taken seriously. The Revolutionary Institutional Party in Mexico, the name's not really that important, but Mexico dominated by a single party for 60 years or so. Only around 2000 did another party win the election. And the Indian National Congress, from 46 to 77, following independence. That was the

party that was the secretary with Gandhi, and he was so influential that his party continued to win all the elections and dominate the country until the late 70s. So dominant party state is a very important category to be aware of. So having now discussed oligarchies, I'll now move on to monarchies. Now, just to note, monarchys are generally classified as autocracies, because they are. They're sort of self-drive power from a single individual, but they're, I think, distinct and important enough to warrant their own category of their own. So there are two basic forms of monarchy.

There's an absolute monarchy and a constitutional monarchy. There's a third category I put in here, which is sort of a transitional or a medium category between the two, which I've called enlightened absolutism or also called enlightened despotism or an enlightened monarch. I'll talk about that in a second. But I'll start with an absolute monarchy. In an absolute monarchy, the monarch exercises ultimate governing authority as a head of the state and government. His or her powers are not limited by constitutional or by law or by other parties. They really dominate the government and they can do whatever they like, or almost whatever.

they like. They have a very large amount of power. It's basically like whatever the sovereign goes, whatever sovereign says, that goes. There's no constitution or other political parties or anything else limiting what they can do. In practice, there are always some limitations on power, but so this is sort of an abstraction, as most of these categories that I'm talking about are. Examples of this include Zaris Russia before the revolution, imperial China, once again before their revolution, the Roman Empire, many ancient and medieval kingdoms throughout the world. And so, yeah, this is a very common form of government, especially in the ancient world, pretty much the only form of government was the absolute monarchy.

There are very few of these that still exist in the world today. Nepal, Tonga and Bhutan, which are all relatively small states. Until recently these were absolute monarchies. Recently they've moved into a more democratic correction. Currently there are only four absolute monarchies which still exist in the world. They are Brunei, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. All of them are Muslim states. Brunei is near Malaysia.

It's in Southeast Asia. Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia are all in the Middle East. And they're all relatively small except for Saudi Arabia. So Saudi Arabia is perhaps the best example of a current absolute monarchy. The royal family still controls that and has a very large-grade power there, maintained by their oil revenues. All of these are also oil-rich states, which is why their absolute monarchs have been able to retain power and not being overthrown. So the next category that I want to talk about,

enlightened absolutism, or enlightened monarch, is it's controversial where this counts as a category, because it's quite historically specific. It basically refers to an absolute monarch who has embraced the principles of the Enlightenment, and so emphasizes rationality and sort of, barical treatment of subjects and religious toleration, freedom of speech, or a degree of freedom of speech, right to private property, fostering of the arts and education and so on. So different leaders throughout history have been enlightened by this category of, you know, fostering arts and industry and toleration and so on, to various degrees.

Some Roman emperors were like this. Some Chinese rules were like this. But specifically the category of enlightened absolutism refers to a bunch of rulers in around 18th century Europe who embraced enlightenment principles. But most of these kings and queens were in Prussia, France, Austria, Russia and Sweden. There are specific monarchs of Russia with them. I won't go through their names. But this is an interesting category. It's often sort of conflated with a benign dictatorship, although it's not exactly the same thing. It's legally an absolute monarch who still has a lot of power, but they don't abuse their power, and particularly they have embraced, you know, toleration and other rationalist enlightened principles.

The final type of monarchy is the constitutional monarchy, which is sort of common. in the world today. Well, there's a few of them. There used to be many more. The Constitutional monarchy is where there is a monarch who is legally the head of state, but they act within the parameters of the Constitution, be it being a written or a customary constitution, so it doesn't have to be written down. Constitutional monarch does not have complete power. So sometimes they have some power, but often increasingly nowadays, they really have no power at all. They only have formal powers or their formality, they're a figurehead, basically. Historically, though, say in 19th century, in the 19th century or even 18th century, the constitution

monarchs did actually have power, say, in Germany, during the German Empire, or the 19th century French empires as well, and the United Kingdom, say, during the 18th century, as they were moving toward constitution monarchy. The monarch did actually have some degree of power, but they didn't have complete power. They were constrained by Parliament and other figures that existed. Mondays, Thailand, Malaysia, Spain, Japan, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, and the UK, and other Commonwealth countries are all constitutional monarchies. In addition to those you've got the ex-commonwealth country, so basically that's Canada, Australia, New Zealand. South Africa used to be, but not anymore.

Constitution monarchy used to be more common, but in many cases it's been replaced by a republic. Okay, so the final category that I want to talk about is autocracies. And remember, monarchys can be classified as autocracies, but here I'm going to distinguish them and really put only the more extreme, modern versions of autocracy in this category. So the first one I'll talk about is a theocracy, term that's thrown around now and then, how you define a theocracy is a bit tricky, because if you ask a theocracy, what a theocracy is, it's a rule by their God,

or sometimes the officials who are divinely guided by their God. If you ask someone who doesn't believe in that religion, or that particular type of the religion, they'll say that a theocracy is just a state governed by some political party, or perhaps a monarch who claims to be guided by God, or sometimes who claims to be a God themselves. So it depends who you ask about what a theocracy is, But basically, it's a state that claims to be divinely guided, or perhaps to rule directly by God. Often degenerate into a monarchy or dictatorship in practice when the whole religion is just used as a support to maintain legitimacy and power. There are quite a few examples of this throughout history, including ancient Israel, imperial cults,

whereby the emperor or kings themselves were actually deified, sometimes during their life, sometimes after their death and viewed as demigods and worshipped and sacrifice to and so on. So this occurred in many ancient kingdoms, but especially Roman Egypt. Other examples of the geographies include, well, the caliphate in general, which was basically the Muslim Arab Muslim Empire that existed in around 8th to 10th centuries or 11th centuries, but especially the first version of that, which was Roshidun Caliphate, which was perhaps the most religiously sincere, you might say, of the caliphates, and still considered legitimate by many modern Muslims that existed around the 7th-8 centuries. Calvinist Geneva and various Puritan settlements in the US could also be considered, to some degree, theocracies, because they were run by, very staunchly religious leaders, according to the Puritan Calvinist ideologies. Early Utah as well, which was settled by Mormon pioneers, perhaps throughout most of the 19th century, until it became sort of more, became a state and sort of more incorporating for the matrimios,

could have been considered as a theocracy, because it was essentially run by the Mormon church. Taliban, Afghanistan as well, could be considered a theocracy. As well, interestingly, the Central Tibetan administration, which is the government in exile of Tibet. Many people don't think of this as a theocracy, but it's headed by the Dalai Lama, who is a religious leader and bases his philosophy and teachings and so on his religious beliefs. So to some degree it can be considered a theocracy. And the Vatican City, also obviously theocracy, basically run by the Pope, and contemporary Iran. Another example of theocracy.

So there are still a few around today. Okay, next category, military rule. This has been a relatively common occurrence in the 20th century especially, but it's existed all throughout history when a general takes over. Basically, military rule describes a number of related circumstances where political power resides with the military in various forms. Sometimes the military themselves can directly appoint themselves as governors of the country. Sometimes it occurs following a military coup, other times not.

Sometimes it also just occurs when the military is not technically in control, but highly influential and highly have a very strong saying what happens in the government. A good example of that would be Japan during World War II. I don't think it was, yeah, it was not technically a military rule because you still have the emperor and a few other civilian civilian. people in the government, but the military was very influential and had a couple of positions on the cabinet and so on, so that would be a good example of a non-de-jure but de facto military rule. England under Cromwell during the 17th century, then the English Revolution

is another example, because Cromwell was a military ruler. That's perhaps one of the first examples of a military rule in history, which do not become a monarch, because usually earlier on, you know, many times throughout history, a military ruler or general has taken over a state or whatever, but generally they'll pronounce themselves a prince or a king or something like that. Cromwell was one of the first cases, at least than I know of that he didn't do that. He maintained a quasi-Republican stance, I suppose, but was in practice military dictatorship. There are only a few existing military rule, military dictators or states-in-under-military rule at the moment, including Egypt following the revolution there in relation to the Alps Ring.

Fiji and the Maldives have also had recent military coups. Myanmar, also known as Burma, was a military, was the state-under-military for a long time, until I think around 2010-11, where they've technically the military has given up power, although once again, the extent to which that's true in practice is questionable. In a state under military rule, it could be a military junta, spelled J-U-N-T-A, which is in control, which is like a committee of military officers governs the country, or it could be a single dictator who is in control. So once again, it can be sort of an aristocracy,

or a military rule that can be more of an oligal, can be more of an autocracy sort of situation, depending on whether it's ruling by one or many. Okay, second last category, a dictatorship. This is when a single individual, the dictator, generally or unconstrained by law or constitutions or other political and social factors, dominates the state. So it's basically the same as a monarchy, except they don't crown themselves as a monarch and they don't claim that sense of legitimacy. I mean, it's basically the same except for title, really. It's more recent because in the past, if someone attained that degree of power, they would just call themselves a king or prince or something. Around the 20th century,

they tended not to do that and just call themselves dictators. Maybe they don't call themselves that, but that's effectively what they were. So this was very common in Europe throughout the 20s, 30s and 40s, you know, Hitler, Mussolini, Franco in Spain, and many other countries were ruled by dictators. Kim Il-sung and his descendants in Korea, a good example of dictators, they very much dominated the state. There are a couple of others who still exist today.

Wama al-Gaddafi in Libya, who was recently overthrown, but he was a good example of dictator. There was also Castro, who sort of handed over power to his brother in Cuba, but he was a dictator for a long time. And many others in the third world, fascist and conceded, communist countries have also been dictators at various times throughout the 20th century. We'll talk more about fascism and communism in a second.

And that dictatorship can be quite stable if the dictator is competent, but there are also obviously legitimacy issues there. Final category that I'll talk about, the subcategory of autocracy, is a totalitarian state. Now, this is a very modern phenomenon, really only dates to the mid-20th century. A totalitarian state is one that a totalitarian state recognizes no limits to its authority at all and strives to regulate every aspect of private and public life wherever feasible or possible. So this is more than just a dictatorship. This is more than just where you have a very powerful government or a government that does not allow elections and so on.

This is where the government goes just beyond that and tries to control every aspect of life. So generally you have state control of media, a single political party, constant all-encompassing propaganda, widespread political repression, a personality cult of the leader or pushing of their ideology through the propaganda. control over the economy as well directing what they want to be achieved in that sense. Severe restriction of speech, mass surveillance, widespread use of terror. It's called totalitarian because it's very totalistic. It's trying to control everything, not just maintain their political power.

Basically, the only examples of totalitarian states are fascist and communist states. Few states have managed to really fully develop the totalitarian ideal that perhaps they aspired to because it requires a great deal of power and wealth in a sense. that's why it's a 20th century phenomenon, because before that the state just lacked the capability technologically and economically to exercise that intensive degree of control over everything. And so a few states have been able to do it effectively. Perhaps some of the most effective to tell Estarian states would be Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and Communist China until they started to reform in the 1970s. Communist China is a good case, because currently

Communist China is not a dictatorship, because it's not dominated by a single individual. It's still nominally communist, which means it still calls herself communist, but in practice is moving away from that. In practice, I think it would be able to call it a single party state because it's not a dominant party state because they don't hold fair elections. They don't call themselves a democracy, but it's controlled by a single political party, the communist party, not a dictatorship because it's not dominated by a single individual, as I said. It's also no longer totalitarian because although it still does a lot of propaganda and still controls parts of the economy, it's no longer nearly as restrictive as free speech or

as all-encompassing into propaganda or as intense. in its control of the economy as it used to be under Mao in the 60s and 70s and so on. So China's a really good example of a state where this sort of classification can be useful because it's helpful to understand what it is and what it is not. There's no real totalitarian state that exists in the world today except for North Korea. That's probably the only totalitarian state that currently exists. Cuba maybe you could call it totalitarian, but it's not quite as much. Just to emphasize another distinction, a totalitarian regime doesn't have to be a dictatorship.

is because there's a personality cult among, uh, in it associated with the single leader, could be Stalin or Hitler or Mao or whoever, but it can also be a single party state. So an example of this might be the, uh, the Soviet Union after, after Lenin and Stalin. After that point, it was sort of moved away from dictatorship

becoming more of a single party state rule by a committee of the leading communists, not a single individual among them. Um, but it was still totalitarian because there was still a lot of restriction of speech and domination of the economy and so on. So a totalitarian doesn't have to be a dictatorship, but often is. That's perhaps a good illustration of how these categories can overlap with each other, because you can have a military rule, which is also a dictatorship, which may or may not be totalitarian, depending on how much it tries to influence society and so on.

And theocracies are often also totalitarian to some degree, although in the case like Taliban, Afghanistan, they really lack the power to be properly totalitarian. Anyway, so that's all the categories I want to talk about in this episode, episode, a bit longer than I expected, but there are quite a lot to go through. Hope you find this useful in sort of understanding the different ways that governments can be organised and in distinguishing different governments in history and in the present world from each other and using labels sort of more precise, you'd be able to understand the nuanced interactions of power within and between countries.

I'll be doing more political science episodes in the future. So, until next time, goodbye.