Governing States

A state has two levels of government: a national government and local governments. At the national scale, a government can be more or less democratic. At the local scale, the national government can determine how much power to allocate to local governments.

National Scale: Regime Types

Some national governments are better able than others to provide the leadership needed to promote peace and prosperity. In contrast, a corrupt repressive government embroiled in wars is less able to respond effectively to economic challenges. National governments can be classified as democratic, autocratic, or anocratic.

Regime Types

Most states are classified as democratic, autocratic, or anocratic.

• A democracy is a country in which citizens elect leaders and can run for office.

• An autocracy is a country that is run according to the interests of the ruler rather than the people.

• An anocracy is a country that is not fully democratic or fully autocratic, but rather displays a mix of the two types.

According to the Center for Systemic Peace, democracies and autocracies differ in three essential elements: selection of leaders, citizen participation, and checks and balances.

Comparing Democracy and Autocracy

The world has become more democratic since the 1970s, according to the Center for Systemic Peace. The Center cites these reasons: the replacement of increasingly irrelevant and out-of-touch monarchies with elected governments that broaden individual rights and liberties, the widening of participation in policymaking to all citizens through rights to vote and to serve in government, and the diffusion of democratic government structures created in Europe and North America to other regions.

Trend Toward Democracy

The number of autocracies has declined sharply since the 1980s. The most rapid increase in democracies came after the breakup of Communist states in Europe.

Pause & Reflect 8.3.2

What region of the world appears to have the greatest concentration of autocratic regimes?

Local Scale: Unitary & Federal

The internal governments of states are organized according to one of two approaches: unitary and federal. The size of the state is not always an accurate predictor of the form of government: Tiny Belgium is a federal state to accommodate the two main cultural groups, the Flemish and the Walloons (refer Belgium: Barely Speaking in Chapter 5 and Figure 5-37), whereas China is a unitary state (to promote Communist values).

Unitary State

In a unitary state, most power is placed in the hands of central government officials. In principle, a unitary government works best in a relatively compact nation-state characterized by few internal cultural differences and a strong sense of national unity. Unitary states are especially common in Europe. France, for example, has a long tradition of unitary government in which a very strong national government dominates local government decisions.

Federal State

Strong power is allocated to units of local government in a federal state. In principle, the federal system is more suitable for very large states because the national capital may be too remote to provide effective control over isolated regions. Most of the world’s largest states are federal, including Russia, Canada, Brazil, India, and the United States (Figure 8-37). For example, the federal state principle is embedded in the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which states: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Federal State

Town Hall meeting, Fayston, Vermont.

In recent years there has been a strong global trend toward federal government. Unitary systems have been sharply curtailed in a number of countries and scrapped altogether in others. In the face of increasing demands by ethnicities for more self-determination, states have restructured their governments to transfer some authority from the national government to local government units. An ethnicity that is not sufficiently numerous to gain control of the national government may be content with control of its territory through a regional or local unit of government.

State Fragility

The Fragile States Index, calculated by the Fund for Peace, measures the relative stability of every country. The index combines several factors, including fairness of the legal system, extent of youth unemployment, level of violence, and freedom to express diverse political views.

Fragile States Index

The index is based on the extent of regional unrest among disaffected citizens, ability of legal system to enforce contracts and property rights, level of compliance with paying taxes, and freedom to express diverse political views.

The most fragile states are clustered in sub-Saharan Africa. This is not surprising, as we have already seen the region to have the world’s highest population growth and poorest health (Chapter 2), the greatest extent of ethnic cleansing and genocide (Chapter 7), and the most problematic shapes of states (see under Shapes of States later in this chapter). The region also has the largest number of recent civil wars.