➜ states are sovereign political institutions that possess the power to make policy decisions and use force legitimately.
➜ states possess their political power due to legitimacy granted by the people of the state, which can come from a variety of sources.
➜ states are made up of institutions that possess official powers, but linkage institutions such as political parties and interest groups can influence their decisions.
➜ the terms state, nation, regime, and government are crucial to differentiate in order to accurately explain a political system.
➜ states can centralize power at the top level, or spread powers among a variety of local institutions.
➜ supranational organizations are a new challenge to the sovereignty of states.
The AP Comparative Government and Politics course is fundamentally a study of states. It includes knowledge of how states are formed, the roles of cultural and historical factors in shaping states, and comparisons of institutional structures of states to better understand their functions. But what are states? States are what people often refer to as “countries” or “nations,” though those are not the appropriate academic terms. Max Weber provided one of the most famous early attempts at defining what a state truly was when he claimed it had a “monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force,” often abbreviated as a “monopoly on violence.” In other words, the states are sovereign, meaning they may choose to implement a decision or law by force with no consequences from any higher authority. Sovereignty requires power, which can be manifested as the threat of physical force, or through many lesser forms. What power truly requires is the ability to compel people to take actions they would not choose to take on their own, and there are many ways to accomplish that. Beyond sovereignty, states must also possess a body of people, a territory with defined boundaries of sovereign rule, and a system of government to make political decisions. Today’s global political system is built upon the supremacy of the state as the foundational unit.
Not all states are created equal. Some states are characterized as strong states, meaning the state has the ability to enact a policy and see through its execution and enforcement. (This is sometimes called the capacity of a state.) For example, when Britain made the decision in 1946 to provide health care to all British citizens through the National Health Service (NHS), it was not only able to create the institutions necessary to run such an operation, but also able to fund the promises of the NHS. A weak state, by contrast, would not necessarily have the capacity to carry out even a program as popular as guaranteed health care for all. Nigeria, for example, often struggles to provide basic legal frameworks and law enforcement for the policies its government enacts. A growing area of concern for the international community is the emergence of failed states, which are unable to provide even basic law and order to their people. Criminal elements and violent non-state actors are free to behave with impunity and have no fear of consequences from state authorities because of the state’s complete lack of capacity to deal with internal problems. Failed states are of special concern because of their potential to act as breeding grounds or safe havens for terrorists, extremists, pirates, and other dangerous elements. Recent examples of failed states include Somalia and Haiti, among others.
Strong, weak, and failed states are terms that describe the capacity of states to implement their policies domestically.
Another separate consideration in this discussion is whether the state possesses autonomy, the ability to enact and carry out a policy without the support of the public. States with high autonomy can take actions that their citizens would be unlikely to support without much fear of consequence, whereas states with low autonomy rely heavily on public support for successful policy implementation. For our purposes, China is an excellent example of a state with consistent high autonomy, whereas the United Kingdom has low autonomy.
Imagine your Comparative Government class meeting together one day, perhaps on the first day of school. Everyone is waiting for direction from someone to begin the day’s lesson. Suddenly, a young person who seems no older than junior-high age walks in, and asks everyone to sit down and open their books to a page of the textbook. Would the class cooperate? Perhaps some would, but not without some degree of confusion. Many others might ignore the young man’s direction altogether, and others may challenge his basis for giving directions in the first place. Then, an adult wearing business attire walks in, and gives the very same direction. Would the class respond differently? Likely, the class would comply, and quickly sit down to begin the day’s reading. Why is the response different? The reason is at the heart of one of the most important concepts in comparative government. The students perceive the adult as the legitimate teacher, possessing the right through official authority to exercise power over the classroom. States attempt to give direction to people in all sorts of ways, and compel them to do things they may not otherwise do. What allows the state to do this is the perception of the public that the state has legitimacy, which means that the people accept the right of the state to rule over them. Max Weber identified three types of legitimacy that states have possessed historically.
Traditional legitimacy exists when the legitimate political rulers acquired their status and power through old traditions that are simply being maintained for consistency and predictability in the present. This is exemplified by the tradition of hereditary monarchies wielding political power across much of the world hundreds of years ago. Leadership was a product of birth simply because that was the way it always was. Often times, traditional legitimacy was justified through religious lore or legend, claiming that one individual or family had been chosen by God, or that a sword was given to a great conqueror by the Lady of the Lake. Examples of rule by traditional legitimacy in our studies will include England before and through its gradual transition into a democratic state, imperial czarist Russia, dynastic China, and Iran before 1979.
Charismatic legitimacy, also sometimes referred to as a personality cult, exists when a single individual so captures the loyalty and attention of the people that the individual leader alone now serves as the basis of the legitimacy of the state. This is often the case in the aftermath of a revolution in which a leader gains a reputation as a great hero of the people and rides the wave of popular support up to the point of exercising complete political power. Charismatic legitimacy is often fostered through manipulating a leader’s public image to portray him as the embodiment of all that is good in the nation. Examples of charismatic legitimacy in this class will include Stalin’s totalitarian Russia, Maoist China, and Ayatollah Khomeini’s rule in Iran after the Islamic Revolution.
States require legitimacy to maintain rule over a population. Legitimacy can come from tradition, personal charisma of a leader, or rational-legal processes.
Rational-legal legitimacy exists in a state where formal understood legal practices and rules of the political game determine who wields political power and when. Leaders exercise power under the terms of the political rules, usually defined in a constitution. Even unpopular leaders continue to rule and exercise political power when they are still serving a defined term of office. The legal rules of the regime—rather than moment-by-moment preferences of the public and those in power—determine how power is acquired and used. In our countries of study, Britain has a long tradition of rational-legal legitimacy rooted in its unwritten constitution, while the other five states fall in a variety of places along the continuum as they try to develop rational-legal processes.
The sovereignty and capacity of a state are manifested in its state institutions, which is a very broad term for all of the various actors that carry out the policymaking and policy implementation functions of the state. Some common institutions that appear in most states include a legislature, an executive, a judiciary, bureaucracies, and a military. Different states will vary in the structures and powers of their institutions, and that will be a major focus of this study in the chapters on individual states. There are also linkage institutions, which connect the people of the country to the formal policymaking process; these include political parties, interest groups, the media, and many others. Linkage institutions will be addressed in more detail in the next chapters.
For success in an AP Comparative Government and Politics course, one of the most important things a student must do is correctly differentiate terminology used to describe the various elements of the state. Colloquially, these terms are sometimes used interchangeably, but a successful academic discussion requires a clear and distinct definition for each.
Nations are groups of people that are bonded together by a shared sense of a sovereign political destiny, most commonly the desire to gain or maintain sovereign self-government. The countries we will study are sometimes firmly united by a strong shared nationality, such as Mexicans or Chinese, who are largely bound together by shared language, history, culture, ethnicity, and in the case of Mexico, a common religion, as well. But not all states have a unified national identity shared among their people. Nigeria is composed of people from over 250 different distinct ethnic groups, each with their own languages and cultural traditions. Religion is highly divisive in Nigeria as well, with large parts of the population practicing Islam, Christianity, or various indigenous religions. There just isn’t a strong sense of what it means to be a Nigerian, which can cause complications for a state attempting to impose a unified policy approach on all of its people. National disunity does not equate to instability, however. Britain is a strong state with a long and stable history of unified sovereignty, yet it is not composed of one nation. There are actually four nations united under the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland: the English, the Scottish, the Welsh, and the Irish of Northern Ireland. Their national differences do not translate into an inability to share the state they live within, although separatist nationalist movements do occasionally have their successes in Scotland.
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Nations are groups of people with a shared political identity that they see as a unifying force.
While minority nations such as the Welsh in the United Kingdom are comfortably integrated into the state they live within, that is not always the case. Some nations are considered stateless nations, because they are poorly integrated into the political system of the state they reside in, and their desire to separate and form their own nation-state is currently unrealized. In this course, examples would include the Chechen people in the Caucasus region of southwestern Russia, and the Uighur people of western China, among many others.
The term regime refers to the rules and systems under which the political process takes place. Regimes determine how individuals and groups acquire and exercise political power. Some regimes are defined in written law, or a constitution, which acts as the supreme and fundamental basis for determining how the political process occurs. Other regimes are shaped by the personality presently holding supreme executive power. Regime change can occur through reform: important but gradual changes to the political rules that do not fundamentally alter the political system. It can also occur through revolution, which is a sudden and radical change in the structures and systems that completely transforms the political regime. Additionally, there can be regime change through a coup d’état in which the military of the state acts internally to displace those currently in power and seize power for itself. These concepts will be discussed in more detail with specific examples in each of the individual country chapters.
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Regimes are the rules a political system operates under, defining who may exercise political power and how they may exercise it.
Perhaps the most frequently misunderstood term in the Comparative Politics course, government refers to those individuals currently exercising political power from official positions of authority. For example, the current president and his administration in Mexico is called a government. When his presidential term is expired and a new election is held, the new president will constitute a change in government. Governments can change through normal and regular political activities, such as a scheduled election in which a previous minority party now wins the majority, or along with broader changes such as a revolution or a coup d’état.
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The government is the people who currently exercise political power, such as the current president and his or her administration.
States can choose to concentrate power at the national level, or decentralize power down to a regional level. The motives for taking either approach depend on an innumerable set of factors that include the history of the formation of the state, ethnic or national diversity, the desire for more efficient (or less efficient) policy implementation, and the list could go on.
Unitary states concentrate all, or almost all, power at the central, national level. Regional governments below the national government may exercise some power, but it will not be particularly meaningful in comparison to the power wielded by the central government. In the AP Comparative Government and Politics course, Britain, China, and Iran are unitary states.
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Unitary states centralize power at one level of government.
One variation on this is a policy of devolution, in which the central government willingly cedes certain key powers to regional governments in order to achieve a policy objective. For example, in Britain, Tony Blair promised a program of devolution in his campaign for prime minister, and upon his victory in 1997, his government created regional parliaments in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland with certain powers, such as control over their local budgets. These powers, however, are not permanently built into the constitution of the crown, and could theoretically be revoked by a simple act of parliament. Thus, a devolved unitary state does not equate to federalism.
In a federal state, there is an official legal constitutional division of powers between the central government and the regional governments, in which certain powers belong to each. The regional governments are permanently established as part of the regime, and have a defined role to play that may not be revoked without major constitutional reform. The earliest form of constitutional federalism was introduced in the United States with the ratification of its constitution. Of the countries covered in the AP Comparative Government and Politics course, Russia, Mexico, and Nigeria are federal systems, though Russia has made a series of recent reforms that have substantially altered the level of autonomy held by its regional republics. Those changes will be addressed in the chapter on Russia.
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Federal states divide power between the central level and regional levels of government.
Increasingly relevant to the modern globalized world is the emergence of supranational organizations, which are governing bodies that allow many sovereign states to send representatives to make collective decisions for the group. The European Union is one such supranational organization. Elections are held in each member state to send representatives to the European parliament, which has power over certain policy areas that the member states have agreed to give the European Union. Sovereign power in areas such as trade and environmental policy are given up; however, there is no common European military, member states retain sovereign power in most policy areas, and also retain the right to choose to leave the European Union should they ever see fit. Clearly the continued sovereignty of the member states is not completely sacrificed to the union. There are many other forms of international organizations and agreements that reduce the sovereignty of the members in specific policy areas, mostly in the realm of trade. Members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) agree to principles to help make trade more free and fair between states, especially for reducing tariffs, quotas, and other restrictions on trade that states may impose. States can bring complaints about trade practices against one another to be settled by the WTO, and membership in the WTO requires states to comply with its decisions. Although these types of organizations that facilitate economic integration place some limitations on their member states, none come as close to creating a true supranational union among states as the European Union does.
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Supranational organizations make policies that limit the sovereign policymaking power of their member states.
Other organizations allow member states to meet and discuss possible collective action, and yet pose little to no threat to the sovereignty of the member states. The United Nations (UN), as one example, holds annual regular sessions where member states discuss a wide array of global issues, and plan collective action to respond to shared problems and humanitarian crises. However, none of the resolutions passed by the UN are binding on the member states, and the UN has no enforcement mechanism to force states to comply, unless individual member states choose to act on their own with economic sanctions (such as restrictions on trade or travel) or military action. For example, when Russia seized the territory of Crimea from the Ukraine in 2014, the UN General Assembly passed resolutions calling on states to refuse to recognize Russia’s possession of the territory. However, no sanctions or punishments were placed on Russia by the UN (since it has no power to do so), but rather, individual states such as the United States and Germany placed their own economic sanctions on Russia to express their disapproval.
In conclusion, states come in many different forms, and possess varying degrees of power and legitimacy, depending on the circumstances of their history and the degree of trust their people place in the institutions of the state. Next, we will examine the people themselves (the nation), and the impact they make on the political system of the state.
*Note: Terms with an asterisk (*) are those that consistently appear on the AP Comparative Government and Politics exam as tested concepts.
The perception of the people that the state and its current leaders possess the right to rule is referred to as
Which of the following would be the best indicator of weakness or failure of a state?
Which of the following most specifically illustrates a change in government, rather than a regime?
A unitary state
Supranational organizations
States are distinct from other organizations that make collective decisions in that states
A state that could successfully carry out public policies that would be unpopular with a large majority of citizens
On what basis would a president who has grown highly unpopular with the public still be able to exercise the formal powers of his or her office for the remainder of the term?
Which of the following is the best example of a nation?
Which of the following is a reason a country might choose to adopt a federal system rather than a unitary system?