INTRODUCTION

We live in the world of nation-states. There are about 200 nation states in the world today. Every state has a separate geographical boundary in which people live under their own political regime. The term ‘regime’ is different from the term ‘system’. While system implies major concepts, functions and structures, the term regime stands for specific institutional arrangements, how relationships are arranged, patterned and organised in a given society. The term political regime denotes the particular political institutional arrangements: how political relationships are structured, and organised in a given society. According to Roy Macridis, a renowned scholar of comparative politics, “a political regime embodies the set of rules, procedures, and understandings that formulate the relationship between the governors and the governed. In every political regime there are a variety of political institutions—the legislature, the political party or parties, bureaucracy, to mention a few—that perform the allotted tasks and roles involved in governance.”

People live in different types of political regimes in which various political institutions play a great variety of roles and perform differently, although the institutions may carry the same name label. Thus legislatures or political parties or bureaucracies play different roles and perform differently in different regimes. Also each political regime is the product of its own peculiar historical, cultural, economic or social and international factors, which condition the political behaviour and the attitude of those who govern and those who are governed. Regimes may also vary in their stability and legitimacy, degree of institutionalisation, status of their development, and the kind of rules that determine the relations between the governors and the governed. They differ “in the organisation of political power, the forms of political participation, the organisation and articulation of interests, and the configuration of political rights.”

For a comparative study of politics, it is essential that we develop some general concept that will help us determine the similarities and differences to enable us to arrive at some descriptive generalisations. Thus it is first necessary to establish a general theory or a framework in terms of which we can identify similarities and differences, classify different political regimes, and generalise about them, in order to understand our political universe.

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF POLITICAL REGIMES

It is difficult to arrive at a consensus on the general characteristics of all types of political regimes as such. Different theorists identify different characteristics of political regimes according to the ways they interpret the functions of political institutions or the specific relationship between various functionaries. Thus for the systems theorist, "a political regime denotes the particular ways and means in which these functions are structured and patterned into institutions and procedures and of their specific relationships." According to them, as summarised by Macridis, a regime must:

1. Generate commonly shared goals and to do so, it must provide for socialisation, for a common acceptance of the goals and the institutions through which these goals are to be realised, i.e. the prevailing ideology.
2. Provide the mechanisms for decision making.
3. Establish mechanisms for articulation of interests and the aggregation of interests that determine policy.
4. Provide for the ways and means whereby decision makers are selected, together with the rules for their succession.
5. Maintain order by providing for effective controls against disruptive behaviour.
6. Be capable of self-preservation.

All political regimes try to perform these functions in different degrees through the institutions they so constitute, and they are assessed in terms of their ability to perform them.