What is a State?

• States are what people often refer to as “countries” or “nations,” though those are not the appropriate academic terms.

• Max Weber provided one of the most famous early attempts at defining what a state truly was when he claimed it had a “monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force,” often abbreviated as a “monopoly on violence.”

  • “Monopoly on violence” a state’s sovereign power to use force legitimately and to determine what the legitimate and illegitimate uses of force are; Max Weber used this phrase to define the nature of a state

• Sovereignty requires power, which can be manifested as the threat of physical force, or through many lesser forms.

• State a political institution that possesses sovereignty, or a “monopoly on violence” over a territory and the people residing within that territory

• Sovereign possessing supreme, autonomous power

Comparing Strong and Weak States

• Some states are characterized as strong states, meaning the state has the ability to enact a policy and see through its execution and enforcement.

  • Strong states states that are deemed legitimate by their citizens and possess the capacity to execute their policies and deliver political goods to their citizens

• A weak state, by contrast, would not necessarily have the capacity to carry out even a program as popular as guaranteed health care for all.

  • Weak states states that operate with limited legitimacy or capacity and are thus less able than strong states to exercise sovereign control over their internal affairs

• Failed states, which are unable to provide even basic law and order to their people.

  • Failed states states that are so weak that they are incapable of providing necessary public goods and services to their citizens

• Autonomy, the ability to enact and carry out a policy without the support of the public.

Legitimacy

• Legitimacy, which means that the people accept the right of the state to rule over them.

• Traditional legitimacy exists when the legitimate political rulers acquired their status and power through old traditions that are simply being maintained for consistency and predictability in the present.

  • Traditional legitimacy a situation wherein the people believe the state has the right to rule because of longstanding customs or practices, such as the passing of the crown to the monarch’s firstborn child

• Charismatic legitimacy, also sometimes referred to as a personality cult, exists when a single individual so captures the loyalty and attention of the people that the individual leader alone now serves as the basis of the legitimacy of the state.

  • Personality cult the use of media, propaganda, spectacles, social controls, and other mechanisms by the state to promote an idealized and heroic image of the country’s leader

• Rational-legal legitimacy exists in a state where formal understood legal practices and rules of the political game determine who wields political power and when.

Institutions

• State institutions, which is a very broad term for all of the various actors that carry out the policymaking and policy implementation functions of the state.

• Linkage institutions, which connect the people of the country to the formal policy making process; these include political parties, interest groups, the media, and many others.

Differentiating Terms

Nations

• are groups of people that are bonded together by a shared sense of a sovereign political destiny, most commonly the desire to gain or maintain sovereign self-government.

• Nation a group of people united by a common political identity, usually the desire for self-rule or political autonomy, and commonly also united by ethnicity, language, religion, culture, or other factors

• Some nations are considered stateless nations, because they are poorly integrated into the political system of the state they reside in, and their desire to separate and form their own nation-state is currently unrealized.

  • Stateless nations groups of people sharing a desire for sovereign self-rule or greater political autonomy but who are not currently integrated into or represented in an existing state

• Capacity the extent to which a state can effectively execute a policy decision it has made

Regimes

• Regimes determine how individuals and groups acquire and exercise political power.

  • Regime the fundamental rules and norms of the political system that determine how power is acquired and used, such as authoritarianism or democracy

• Some regimes are defined in written law, or a constitution, which acts as the supreme and fundamental basis for determining how the political process occurs.

• Regime change can occur through reform: important but gradual changes to the political rules that do not fundamentally alter the political system.

  • Reform changes made to regimes through the existing political system and political institutions, without rapid trauma or revolutionary change

• Revolution, which is a sudden and radical change in the structures and systems that completely transforms the political regime.

  • Revolution rapid, traumatic wholesale changes to a regime, typically changing the nature of the political system and creating new political institutions while destroying old ones

• Coup d’état in which the military of the state acts internally to displace those currently in power and seize power for itself.

• National Health Service (NHS) Britain’s public health service system, which provides health care to all British citizens at taxpayer expense

Government

• Government refers to those individuals currently exercising political power from official positions of authority.

  • The government is the people who currently exercise political power, such as the current president and his or her administration.

Centralization and Decentralization of Power

• States can choose to concentrate power at the national level, or decentralize power down to a regional level.

• The motives for taking either approach depend on an innumerable set of factors that include the history of the formation of the state, ethnic or national diversity, the desire for more efficient (or less efficient) policy implementation, and the list could go on.

• Devolution, in which the central government willingly cedes certain key powers to regional governments in order to achieve a policy objective.

Unitary States

• Unitary states concentrate all, or almost all, power at the central, national level.

  • Unitary states centralize power at one level of government.

  • Unitary state an arrangement that concentrates political power at the central or national level of government and provides very limited or impermanent powers to regional levels

Federalism

• In a federal state, there is an official legal constitutional division of powers between the central government and the regional governments, in which certain powers belong to each.

  • Federal states divide power between the central level and regional levels of government.

• Federal system an arrangement that divides or shares power on a permanent or constitutional basis between a central or national government and regional governments

Supranational Organizations

• Supranational organizations, which are governing bodies that allow many sovereign states to send representatives to make collective decisions for the group.

  • The European Union is one such supranational organization.

  • European Union the political and economic union of more than a dozen European member states, all of which surrender some sovereign control over their own country in order to promote trade and cooperation among the member states

  • Elections are held in each member state to send representatives to the European parliament, which has power over certain policy areas that the member states have agreed to give the European Union.

• Supranational organizations make policies that limit the sovereign policymaking power of their member states.

• World Trade Organization (WTO) a supranational organization that encourages its 164 member states to engage in freer trade and expand trade relationships by establishing agreed-upon rules of trade among the members