The document discusses political regimes and their definitions. It describes that a political regime involves patterns that determine access to government positions and resources. Regimes are typically categorized as democratic or authoritarian. Democracies have competitive elections while authoritarian regimes restrict participation. There are subtypes of each, like direct vs representative democracy, and populist vs communist authoritarianism. Regimes can also be hybrid systems with elements of both democracy and authoritarianism.

1. Political Regimes

2. Political Regime
 is an aggregate of patterns, explicit or not,
that determines the forms and channels of
access to principal governmental positions, the
characteristics of the actors that are admitted
or excluded from such access, and the
resources and strategies that they can use to
gain access.
 This necessarily involves institutionalization,
i.e., the patterns defining a given regime must
be habitually known, practiced, and accepted,
at least by those which these same patterns
define as participants in the process.
 For the purposes of summary comparison and
generalization, these ensembles of patterns are
given generic labels such as authoritarian and
democratic, and occasionally broken down
further into subtypes.

3. Definitions of Different Types
of Political Regime
 Democracy is an institutional
arrangement for arriving at
political decisions in which
individuals acquire the power to
decide by means of a
competitive struggle for the
people’s vote. This is of course
no more definite than is the
concept of competition. To
simplify matters we have
restricted the kind of
competition for leadership,
which is to define democracy,
to free competition for a free
vote.

4. Definitions of Democracy
 Direct Democracy means that
the citizens themselves
assemble to debate and decide
on collective issues.
 Representative Democracy
means that citizens elect
politicians to reach collective
decisions on their behalf, with
the governing parties held to
account at the next election.

5. Definitions of Democracy
 Liberal Democracy refers to the scope of
democracy that includes constitutional
protection of individual rights, including
freedom of assembly, religion, and speech.
 New Democracy is a democracy in which an
authoritarian legacy continues to influence
political action and debate. Democracy is
not the only game in town.
 Semi-Democracy refers to illiberal
democracy in which elected politician do
not respect individual rights, or in which
elected governments form a façade behind
which previous rulers continue to exercise
effective power.

6. Examples of Diminished Subtypes of Democracy

7. Rod Hague and Martin Harrop (2004: 47) further developed
a distinction between ‘new democracies’ that are still
developing in terms of political regime and already established
semi-democratic regimes:
A semi-democracy blends democratic and
authoritarian elements in stable combination. By
contrast, a new democracy is one that has not yet
had time to consolidate; that is, democracy has not
become the „only game in town’. In practice, new
democracies and semi-democracies show similar
characteristics but a new democracy is transitional
while a semi- democracy is not. Assuming a new
democracy does not slide back into authoritarian
rule, it will develop into either an established
democracy or a semi-democracy.

8. Definitions of Different Types
of Political Regime
 Authoritarian Regime is a
political system with limited,
not responsible, political
pluralism, without elaborate
and guiding ideology, but with
distinctive mentalities [of the
people, without extensive nor
intensive political
mobilization, except at some
points in their development,
and in which a leader or
occasionally a small group
exercises power within
formally ill-defined limits, but
actually quite predictable
ones.

9. Definitions of
Authoritarian Rule
 Authoritarian Rule refers to any form of non-democratic
rule. Those non-democratic regimes which, unlike totalitarian
states, do not seek to transform society and the people in it.
 Totalitarian Rule is a regime that aims for total penetration
of society in an attempt, at least in theory to transform it.
 Communist Regime is a political system in which the
communist party monopolizes power, leading to an all-
encompassing bureaucratic state. In theory, the objective is
to implement Marx’s vision of a classless society.
 Fascist Regime is a regime based on an anti-liberal doctrine
that glorifies the nation and advocates a warrior state, led by
an all-powerful leader, to whom the masses show passionate
commitment and submission.
 Military Rule is a government by the military, often ruling
through a junta comprising the leader from each branch of
the forces.

10. Historical Development and
Change of Regimes
 Until modern times states were normally ruled by authoritarian regimes and
most of these were hereditary monarchies. These monarchical authoritarian
regimes were based on a traditional form of inherited personal rule that was
restrained to varying degrees by traditional customs and institutions.
However, once democracy began to compete with the monarchies, the latter
would increasingly be replaced by at least semi-democratic republics or
constitutional monarchies.
 In his highly influential book The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late
20th Century (1991) American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington
suggested that historically there were three major periods of transition from
various forms of authoritarian rule to democracy worldwide. He calls them
waves of democratization. In between these waves, there were significant
shifts back to authoritarianism in some of the newly democratized countries
(reverse waves).

11. Historical Development and
Change of Regimes
Samuel Huntington’s three waves of democratization

12. Historical Development and
Change of Regimes
Robert Dahl’s typology of democratization processes

13. Typologies of Democracy and
Authoritarian Rule
Models of Democracy
Majoritarian and Consensus Democracies

14. Majoritarian and Consensus Democracies

15. Decentralist and Centripetal Democracy
 Centripetalism. Institutions in a centripetal system] must be inclusive – they
must reach out to all interests, ideas, and identities and they must be
authoritative – they must provide an effective mechanism for reaching
agreement and implementing that agreement. The concept of centripetalism
thus implies both (a) broad-based inclusion and (b) centralized authority.
Centripetal institutions thus encourage a search for common ground and
culminate in an authoritative decision-making process, one not easily waylaid
by minority objections
 Decentralism. Diffusion of power, broad political participation, and limits on
govern- mental action. Decentralist government is limited government. Each
independent institution acts as a check against the others, establishing a high
level of interbranch accountability. The existence of multiple veto points
forces a consensual style of decision-making. Decentralized authority
structures may also lead to greater popular control over political decision-
making. Efficiency is enhanced by political bodies that lie close to the
constituents they serve.

16. Decentralist and Centripetal Democracy
 What are the specific institutional embodiments of
decentralism? Separate powers implies two elective lawmaking
authorities as well as a strong and independent judiciary.
Federalism presumes the shared sovereignty of territorial units
within the nation-state. Both also suggest a bicameral legislature,
to further divide power at the apex and to ensure regional
representation. The decentralist model seems to imply a written
constitution, perhaps with enumerated individual rights and
explicit restrictions on the authority of the central state. Most
decentralists embrace the single-member district as a principle of
electoral law, maximizing local-level accountability. Some
advocate preferential-vote options or a system of open primaries,
thus decentralizing the process of candidate selection.

17. Decentralist and Centripetal Democracy
 Unitary (rather than federal) sovereignty, unicameralism or
weak bicameralism, parliamentarism (rather than presidentialism),
and a party-list proportional electoral system. In addition, the
centripetal polity should be characterized by a strong cabinet,
medium- strength legislative committees, strong party cohesion,
no limits on tenure in office, congruent election cycles, closed
procedures of candidate selection (limited to party members),
party-centered political campaigns, multiparty (rather than two-
party) competition, centralized and well-bounded party
organizations, centralized and party-aligned interest groups, a
restrained (nonactivist) judiciary, and a neutral and relatively
centralized bureaucracy
Such institutional arrangement is approximated by the political
system of the USA. The centripetal democracy, by contrast, results
from a completely different institutional juncture:

18. Holistic Models of Democracy
 Holistic models are increasingly undermined by cross-national
learning processes, and the diffusion of particular institutional
arrangements. Democracies, in short, are less and less likely to be
closed or self-contained systems, and in this sense they are also
less and less likely to reflect totally consistent patterns when
subject to comparative whole- system analysis.
There are at least two problems with the holistic models of
democracy, such as those proposed by Lijphart and Gerring et al.
According to Peter Mair (2011: 97), ‘in practice, democracies rarely
prove as sharply bounded or as internally coherent as the various
theoretically informed whole-system models might suggest.’ Most real-
world cases usually have certain features of both of the contrasting
ideal types. What is more:

19. Types of Authoritarian Rule

20. Types of Authoritarian Rule
 Populist Presidential Authoritarianism. Emerges through an
elected president’s personal misappropriation of power, which
Latin America long ago labelled an autogolpe or ‘self- coup’’.
Although [it] does not involve any military or party organization, it
can be analyzed in principal–agent terms as a reversal of the
relationship between the electorate as principal and the elected
president as its agent. By reversing the relationship, the president
makes the electorate the instrument of his personal rule in the
sense of providing him with a claim to democratic legitimacy,
which he usually confirms by having himself re-elected. These new
elections will be un- democratic, but the populist president may be
genuinely popular with a wide section of the people.

21. Types of Authoritarian Rule
 The communist regime is historically the most important as
well as most numerous subtype. It produced one of the 20t h
century’s super-powers, the Soviet Union, and seems set to
produce another superpower in the 21st century if China maintains
its rate of economic progress. At their numerical peak in the 1980s
there were nearly two dozen regimes that espoused the basic
communist ideolog y of Marxism-Leninism. But about a third of
these regimes were actually personal dictatorships, which left less
than a dozen „true’ cases of organizational rule by the communist
party. And so many communist regimes collapsed in the late 1980s
and early 1990s that now only three of these organizational
dictatorships still survive – China, Vietnam, and Laos.

22. Overview: Political Regime
 The political regime is arguably the most
holistic criterion that defines the political
system of any state. Covering all patterns that
determine the actors, procedures, and
resources to access state power, political
regimes ultimately fall under the two main
categories known to political science –
democracy and authoritarian rule. There are,
however, real-world political systems that
manage to incorporate both democratic and
authoritarian institutions. Some of them are in
a transitional phase on the way to either
authoritarianism or democracy. The others, as
the post-transition paradigm in comparative
politics would have us believe, have reached a
stable institutional condition and are best
classified as hybrid semi-democratic regimes.

23. Prepared and demonstrated by:
ROMMEL R. REGALA, Ph.D.
To God be the Glory!