Week 5 — Regimes on Paper: Sorting Four Invented Governments and Tracing a Slow Slide — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Introduction to Political Science Free sample edition

Traditional alternative (no AI), unpublished. In the course this is a separate assignment that ships unpublished beside the adaptive assignment: same objective, no AI. An instructor who prefers it publishes it and unpublishes or deletes the adaptive one, as the note at its top says.

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 5 of the term — invent four governments and sort them, trace a slow slide away from democracy, and explain the difference between holding elections and being a full democracy to someone who mixes them up.

This week you learned to sort the forms government takes: direct and representative democracy, electoral and liberal democracy, the hybrid regime, authoritarian and totalitarian rule, the republic, the third wave, and the difference between democratic backsliding and a coup. Week 2 gave you legitimacy, and Week 1 gave you the empirical/normative distinction; this assignment puts both to work on governments you invent. In this assignment you work two short counting problems, interpret each one, and explain the difference between holding elections and being a full democracy to someone who has never studied political science. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Political Analysis Workshop practice the same ideas from other angles.

The task

You will invent four governments for four made-up countries. Treat every regime as illustrative: give each country an invented name or a letter, and keep every real country, real person, and current government out of it.

Work these two problems, showing how you got each count:

You describe 4 invented regimes and check each one against 3 marks that a liberal democracy adds to the election floor (protected rights, a free press, and an independent judiciary). How many checks do you record?
An invented democracy's governing party takes 1 legal-looking step against the courts, the press, or the election rules at the end of every 2-year stretch, over 6 years. How many steps does it take?

Beside each count, add the interpretation that makes it political science:

Problem 1, four regimes on paper. Describe four invented regimes in two to four sentences each: one liberal democracy, one electoral democracy, one hybrid regime, and one regime that is either authoritarian or totalitarian. For each regime, record whether it meets the election floor (free, fair, competitive elections that the people in power can lose) and then check it against the three liberal marks, one at a time. For your non-democratic regime, say whether it is authoritarian or totalitarian, and defend the label by scope, not by harshness. For one regime, say whether it is a republic and explain why that is a separate question from whether it is a democracy.
Problem 2, a slow slide. Take your electoral or liberal democracy from Problem 1 and write the legal-looking steps its governing party takes, one sentence each. Explain, using the two tests of tempo and legality, why the sequence is democratic backsliding and not a coup, then write one sentence describing what a coup in the same country would look like instead. Finally, choose one of this week's pinned fragments, quote it exactly, label it empirical-leaning or normative, and state one limit on using it as evidence about democracy. The two fragments are Pericles, in the Crawley translation (1874) of Thucydides, Book II: "Its administration favours the many instead of the few; this is why it is called a democracy." and Churchill, in the Hansard record of the House of Commons in November 1947, column 207: "it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time".

Explain it to a non-expert

A cousin tells you, "That country holds elections, so it's a democracy, end of story." Write a 3–5 sentence message to that cousin that explains, in everyday words, the difference between the election floor and a liberal democracy, uses one of your four invented regimes as the example, and names one limit of the labels, such as the fact that real regimes sit along a range and observers can disagree about where one falls. Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one good answer is possible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a lifeguard explaining to a new swimmer why the pool has both a lifeguard and posted rules. Model answer: "The posted rules tell everyone what is allowed, but rules alone do not keep anyone safe. Someone has to be watching and able to act when a rule is broken. That is why the pool has both. The limit is that one lifeguard cannot see every corner at once, so swimmers still need to look out for each other."

Use that pattern for your message to the cousin, with your own wording and evidence.

Show how you got each count. A reader should be able to reproduce both counts from the values above without guessing which values or steps you used.

After you finish, reread your work and revise at least one regime, step, or explanation. Then add a short reflection (3–4 sentences) on one of two options of equal weight, your choice: (a) which regime or step you changed and why the new version is better; or (b) which label you first got wrong, and how you caught it.

Deliverables

Submit a single analysis file containing:

the two counts, each with the values and the operation shown;
your four regimes on paper (each checked against the election floor and the three liberal marks, the non-democracy labelled by scope, and one regime's republic question);
your slow slide (the steps, the tempo-and-legality explanation, the contrasting coup, and one pinned fragment quoted exactly, labelled by kind, with one limit);
your message to the cousin; and
your revision note with the reflection option you chose.

Keep it to roughly two pages. Clear and accurate beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your work as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about four minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled sorting chart with a short note. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the counts, the regimes, the analysis, and the writing yourself, without any AI tool. Quote only the pinned Pericles and Churchill fragments, exactly, and state Arendt's, Linz's, and Huntington's ideas in your own words. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's analysis, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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