Week 5 — Forms of Government & Regime Types

Introduction to Political Science Free sample edition

Why this matters

A nursing student whose hospital union votes on a contract and a future journalist deciding which official sources to trust both need to tell a full democracy from a hollow one.

In plain language

This week is about the different ways a country can be ruled, and how to tell them apart. Democracy (rule by the people) turns out to hide two separate questions: do people vote on laws themselves or elect others to do it, and does the system protect rights or only hold elections? You will also learn to tell authoritarian rule (a ruler or small group that answers to no one) from totalitarian rule (a state that tries to remake all of society). You will also tell a slow slide away from democracy from a sudden seizure of power. Then you will read two famous defenses of democracy, one from ancient Athens and one from the British Parliament in 1947, and check exactly what each one says; no one will tell you which form is best, but you will learn to judge the arguments.

Already covered: Week 2 built legitimacy; Week 4 gave you a method for taking a value argument apart.
This week: direct and representative democracy, electoral, liberal, and hybrid regimes, authoritarian and totalitarian rule, backsliding, and Pericles and Churchill.
How they connect: every regime claims legitimacy, and Week 4's tools test the case for democracy.
Where we're going next: Week 6, Constitutions, Constitutionalism & the Rule of Law.

Focus

When a country holds elections, is it a democracy, and how do you tell the forms of government apart?

By the end of this module, you should be able to:

[ ] sort a regime as liberal, electoral, or hybrid
[ ] tell authoritarian from totalitarian rule by scope
[ ] tell democratic backsliding from a coup
[ ] read Pericles and Churchill exactly and sort each line by kind

To-do

Plan your week

Read Chapter 5 (45 minutes), then the lecture and slides.
Do the lecture tutorial (60–90 minutes) and practice set (20 minutes).
Do the Political Analysis Workshop (90 minutes), the discussion, and the assignment.
Take the quiz.

This week's checkpoint: sort one invented regime as liberal, electoral, or hybrid, and say what its election sits on.

You've got this

Take it in order, and ask your instructor early.

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