INTRODUCTION

• The world today consists of about 200 nation-states, each with a separate geographical boundary where people live under their own political regime.

• The term regime differs from system. While a system refers to major concepts, functions, and structures, regime refers to specific institutional arrangements, and how relationships are structured and organized in a society.

• A political regime denotes particular political institutional arrangements, specifying how political relationships are structured and organized in a given society.

• According to Roy Macridis, a political regime embodies a set of rules, procedures, and understandings that define the relationship between the governors and the governed.

• Every political regime contains various political institutions, such as the legislature, political parties, and bureaucracy, which perform assigned tasks in governance.

• Political regimes vary in the roles and performances of political institutions, even if the institutions carry the same name label.

• Each political regime is shaped by its own historical, cultural, economic, social, and international factors, which influence the political behavior and attitudes of both the governors and the governed.

• Regimes differ in their stability, legitimacy, degree of institutionalisation, status of development, and the rules that determine the relationship between the governors and the governed.

• They also vary in the organisation of political power, forms of political participation, organisation and articulation of interests, and the configuration of political rights.

• For comparative political study, it is important to develop general concepts that allow us to identify similarities and differences between political regimes and make descriptive generalisations.

• It is necessary to establish a general theory or framework to identify similarities and differences, classify different political regimes, and generalize about them to better understand the political universe.

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF POLITICAL REGIMES

• It is difficult to reach a consensus on the general characteristics of all types of political regimes, as different theorists identify varying characteristics based on how they interpret the functions of political institutions or the relationships between functionaries.

• For systems theorists, a political regime refers to the specific ways in which functions are structured and patterned into institutions and procedures, and the relationships between them.

• According to Macridis, a regime must:

  1. Generate commonly shared goals, and to do so, it must provide for socialisation and common acceptance of the goals and institutions through which these goals are realized, i.e., the prevailing ideology.

  2. Provide mechanisms for decision-making.

  3. Establish mechanisms for the articulation and aggregation of interests that determine policy.

  4. Provide ways and means for selecting decision makers, along with rules for their succession.

  5. Maintain order by providing effective controls against disruptive behavior.

  6. Be capable of self-preservation.

• All political regimes try to perform these functions in varying degrees through the institutions they create and are assessed based on their ability to perform these functions.