Global Chat: Video Transcript

Episode 2: Regimes, States, Nations, and Governments

Hello, students of history and political science! I’m Mr. Tesch, and welcome to Global Chat, where we explore the ins and outs of the field of study known as “Comparative Politics.”

In this video, we’re going to define some basic terms that we will be using all the time in Comparative Government: state, regime, government, and nation. Now if you watch the news on TV or read about politics on the internet, you might notice that many people use these words interchangeably. These terms have very different meanings, though, and in our course, using these words correctly will help us understand each other.

The first term that we have to be able to define is the term “state.” You probably use this word all the time: if you talk about the United Kingdom, Russia, China, Mexico, Iran, or Nigeria, you are talking about states. And if you’ve ever asked yourself, what is a state, you are not alone.

Take Max Weber. He was a German thinker who grappled with the challenge of defining the word “state” in his 1922 book, Economy and Society. Weber defined the state as any organization that holds a monopoly over the legitimate use of force in a territory. To put it another way, states are political organizations that combine a permanent population of people with governing institutions to exercise control over a defined territory with international recognition.

These definitions might seem confusing, but if we think about it for a minute, it makes sense. Let’s use Russia as an example. It is a state that controls a huge territory that stretches from Eastern Europe to Eastern Asia. Within that territory, only the state has the legitimate authority to use force. Russia uses force by creating various institutions, such as a military and a police force. 

These institutions are part of what makes up Russia’s government. A government is a set of institutions or individuals legally empowered to make binding decisions for a state. States have all kinds of institutions. They have legislatures, which create laws; executives who make sure those laws are carried out; courts to make sure laws are applied fairly and equally; a military to protect their citizens from other adversarial states; and many more. Taken together, all of these institutions and the people who are a part of them are what we refer to as a “government.”

An important feature of governments is that they change all the time, and change more easily and often than do regimes or states. Whenever there is an election, when new government officials are appointed, or when a new monarch assumes the throne, there has been a change in government. 

So we say that governments are a set of institutions. These institutions are what we will refer to as state institutions. They are created by the state for the purpose of making decisions and carrying out the functions of a state. But what about other institutions? Aren’t there institutions in the world that are created by the people in a state, and not the state itself? Of course there are; and we call these types of institutions linkage institutions. The role of linkage institutions is to connect people to policy making. There are many great examples: political parties, interest groups, labor unions, and even the news media. All of these linkage institutions help people interact with their government. This is especially true in highly democratic societies, which brings us to the topic of regimes.

All states have some form of government, but if you take a closer look, you’ll quickly see that these governments operate very differently. Some of them concentrate a lot of power in one person, like monarchies and dictatorships, while others are run by people who are chosen by citizens through elections. The reason for these differences is that states have very different rules for how their governments operate, and these rules are what we refer to as regimes. In general, we will be learning about democratic regimes and authoritarian regimes. These can be broken down into very many different subtypes that we will be looking at in more detail later in the course. For now, it is important to know just this basic difference.

Like governments, regimes can also change, although this is more rare. Sometimes, regimes change incrementally and slowly over time. In Russia, the regime has been changing incrementally since the year 2000, as Vladimir Putin has slowly changed the Russian constitution to give himself and his political party more power. Regimes can also change more rapidly or dramatically, though, as was the case with the Iranian revolution of 1979. This revolution began very suddenly, when a huge number of Iranians took to the streets to protest the rule of their king, Reza Shah. The Shah soon fled to the United States, and the people of Iran established a new government under the leadership of a religious scholar called Ayatollah Khomeini, whom they gave the title “Supreme Leader.” Later in our course, we will be taking a closer look at this event.

The last term that we have to define is nation, which refers to people who live within a state. A nation is a group of people with commonalities including race, language, religion, ethnicity, political identity, and aspirations. States sometimes have one, but most are made up of several distinct nations. A good example are the Scottish people, who live in the northern part of the United Kingdom. Now, legally speaking, they are British citizens, and could correctly call themselves British. But if you’ve ever met someone from Scotland, you’ll know that they are proud of their culture and heritage, and are much more likely to refer to themselves as Scottish than British. 

One of the most important features of nations is their shared political identity. Because of their sense of national pride, for example, the Scottish people have voted to give themselves more political autonomy. In a referendum held in 1997, the Scottish voted in favor of establishing a Scottish national parliament. This parliament allows the people of Scotland to make certain decisions for themselves and independently of the Westminster Parliament in London.

Now at this point, you might be asking yourself, why would the United Kingdom want to allow the people of Scotland to have more political power of their own? And what led the people of Iran to want to overthrow the government of their king Reza Shah? The answer to both of these questions has to do with something political scientists call “Legitimacy.”

Legitimacy refers to whether a government’s constituents believe their government has the right to use power in the way that they do. In other words, a government is legitimate when the people who are governed believe in or respect their government’s right to rule. Legitimacy gives authority to a government, and can increase a government’s power. By allowing the people of Scotland to form a Scottish National Parliament and make some of their own political decisions locally, the government of the United Kingdom increased its legitimacy. This is important because if a government begins to lose legitimacy, it sometimes leads to a revolution or overthrow of the government as was the case in Iran. For a government to keep its power, it needs to maintain its authority.

There are however different ways for governments to maintain their legitimacy. Democratic regimes maintain their legitimacy by holding free and fair elections, and by applying laws fairly and equally to all their citizens. This leads constituents or people to trust that their government is acting in the best interest of the majority of the population. Political scientists call this type of legitimacy “rational-legal legitimacy.”

Authoritarian regimes, on the other hand, can’t claim to represent their constituents in the same way. In countries like China, the government claims to be legitimate because it is effective. Chinese leaders like President Xi Jinping are constantly pointing out that their government has reduced crime or led the country down a path of economic growth. This bolsters the Chinese government’s claim that the Chinese people ought to accept its authority.

Another type of legitimacy we should address is “Traditional Legitimacy,” which is the kind of legitimacy that exists when an institution becomes part of a country’s history, culture, and tradition. The United Kingdom is an interesting case of this because it combines democracy with monarchy. Today, Queen Elizabeth II formally represents the United Kingdom as its Head of State, and someday, members from her family – the Windsor family – will succeed her as Head of State. Now you might assume that the citizens of a democracy like the United Kingdom would be unhappy to still be the subjects of a queen. This is completely untrue. In 2018, a poll by Statista found that over ⅔ of the British people support the monarchy. This shows that the monarchy enjoys a high degree of legitimacy in the UK, in part because it is a longstanding institution of the United Kingdom, and has become part of the country’s history and culture. This is what we mean when we talk about “traditional legitimacy.” 

But neither traditional nor rational-legal legitimacy explain the type of government that I mentioned earlier when I talked about the Islamic Republic of Iran that was established in 1979. Why would the people of Iran choose to give one man, Khomeini, almost dictatorial power over themselves and their country? The answer is something political scientists call charismatic legitimacy. Khomeini was an Islamic scholar in the deeply religious country of Iran. He became popular after he was exiled for calling for a return to a theocratic government — a government in which religion is central. Khomeini believed that the people of Iran would be happier and better off if they made their political decisions on the basis of Islam, the majority religion in Iran. The people loved Khomeini, and called for him to be returned from his exile so that he could establish a government on the principles that he had described. An extremely charismatic man, Khomeini was loved and respected by the people whom he would eventually come to govern. This kind of charisma by an individual leader is what we mean when we talk about charismatic legitimacy. 

Now that we’ve seen how governments maintain power, we need to talk about how power is divided between national and local governments. In our course, we will be learning about unitary and federal states. 

A unitary state is one in which power is concentrated at the national level of government. In our course, the United Kingdom, China, and Iran are examples of unitary states. To be sure, all of these countries have regional or local governments. The United Kingdom is made up of England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland; China is divided into 33 provinces; and Iran has is divided into 28 “Ostans” or provinces. What makes all of these states unitary is that the local or regional governments don’t automatically have any protected powers of their own, they have only those powers which are granted to them by the national government. The 2014 referendum that we discussed earlier called for the creation of a national parliament for Scotland, and that power was granted to Scotland by the national government of the UK. On a side note, the technical term for the transfer of power from a national government to a local government is devolution.

Federal states like Russia, Mexico, and Nigeria operate a little differently. All of these states have constitutions that provide powers specifically to their state governments that the national government cannot override. This has some advantages. Nigeria, for example, is one of the most diverse countries in the world, but also struggles with a great deal of ethnic conflict. In the North of Nigeria, the largely Muslim population has very different set of values and political demands than the largely Christian South. Because Nigeria is federal, though, the North has been able to establish its own Sharia courts that rule in accordance with Islamic law. This is a good example of how federalism can be useful for reducing regionalized, local conflicts in states.

In this video, we’ve talked about the meanings of the words state, regime, government, and nation. We’ve also talked about legitimacy as a source of state power, and the difference between unitary and federal states. For more information and additional resources, please check in the description below this video. And remember to subscribe to catch more of our videos. Thank you for watching, and see you next time!