Political regime

The main topic of my essay is the “political regime”. I present the first explanation from the book of Igor Ivanovich Sanzharevsky “Political Science: A Dictionary-Directory” which he wrotes on the works of Jean-Louis Kermond. I. Sanzharevsky defines this term as a set of elements of ideological, institutional and sociological order that contribute to the formation of political management of a given country for a certain period.

As for my opinion, I think that this definition can give a good understanding of this term for those people who are not very involved in the political sphere and when they read it, their perception will be formed in the right way and after reading it, people will understand that the term means only what kind of government system they have, what the government is trying to make or is doing in conjunction with the various orders that exist at the moment. The advantage of this definition is that people after reading will understand the basic things and their knowledge will already help them to be politically educated.

The downside is in a very superficial study and presentation of this term, so I think that for people interested in political life, it will be more correct to know the words written by P. Schmitter. He give us a broader definition, which says that the “political regime” is a set of rules that determine: the forms and procedures for the distribution of political power and public office; channels and available strategies for political competition and how many actors are involved in the exercise of political power.

This definition is much more extensive than the previous one. It gives us an almost complete picture of how we should, for example, assess the political regime of a country because already in the definition there are such words as: ’’the forms that determine the distribution of power, the involvement of citizens in the exercise of political power, and so on, and they are almost the main criteria for assessing political regimes in the world. ’’.

In general, in order to fully appreciate, for example, the state needs to resort to using the following elements: media, parties, elections, power, ideology, constitution, interest groups, economy, army and corruption. Only after a thorough study of each element in the country we can understand what political regime exists there. The term ’’political regime’’ has a two very important approaches. Andrey Yurievich Melvile wrote a book with name ’’political science’’. In this book, he explains the various political topics.

One of these topics is a ’’political regime’’. At the beginning he writes that In political science there are two main approaches to the definition of ’’political regime’’ – legal and sociological. In the first case the explanation is confined to official forms and legal methods management, which are based on formal-legal criteria for functioning of power. Thus the concept of ’’political regime’’ comes closer in the meaning with the form of government of the state, it is constitutional and legal basis.

According to formal-legal principles we can distinguish democratic regimes, where law limits the actions of the authorities, and autocracy with the tyranny of the rulers, who do not respect the laws. In this area, very significant the analysis of the relation of the state to legally enshrined norms (including the fundamental rights and freedoms of citizens) and the internal mechanism institutional interaction of the state authorities.

More modern sociological approach to the interpretation of political regimes is based on different criteria. In the formula of Maurice Duverger noted that the political regime is rather special social mechanism, a way of social control, connecting, on the one hand, the basic model of elections, voting and decision-making, and other methods of political participation parties and interest groups on the other hand. The term ’’Political regime’’ has about 140- 160 different types of regimes, many of which differ very little from each other.

This determines a wide variety of approaches to the classification of political regimes. The most free and widespread regime is a democracy, where the central government is legitimate, local residents and citizens play a big role in the management of politics and power. But I would like to tell more about totalitarian political regime. This regime is very interesting to study. In terms of a totalitarian regime the state attempts to totally control its citizens.

Having a look at the countries with totalitarianism, most of common people will become horrified because the head of the country is not elected by the official selection, government has monopolies in all spheres of life, economy can not develop in a free way because they have a planned economy and usually these countries are very different to get in and out. What is more, other governments usually do not have sufficient information about main aspects of political and social life in this totalitarian state. The best example of such countries is the North Korea with comrade Kim Jong-un in the head.

Comparing totalitarian state with a democratic one, we can find out several similarities: in both regimes we have got the head of the state, territorial borders, civil society and some other elements, which are actually peculiar for all the states no matter what regime they have. I guess that many political terms are used very much a part of ordinary people, because these terms are much more simple, certainly compared to some chemical or physical terms, which are used by scientists only in specific situations compared to politics and in addition in the Newspapers and on TV shows quite a lot of news directly related to politics.

The policy includes many words that we encounter in Newspapers, on television or in simple situations, because the world real-time has a very big tendency to discuss any of the important things happening in the world. I guess ordinary people understand by this term something very General, not paying much attention to the details. For example: just some political leader establishes in the country a special political regime which is called ’Dictablanda’, perhaps this is a very cool political regime, but I’m not going to go into details, I have enough of this information.

Or: in Russia there is a democratic system , is it true? I’m not sure, but will not be checked. And perhaps they use this term in their own interest to somehow be involved in politics, and a little bit to imagine what happen in the country or the world, without following any professional goals. As for the politicians, I think that their perception is more concrete and formulated in exact way because these people must be at least somehow competent in using terminology.

I suppose, that they use this term to describe some certain way of ruling and sometimes manipulating other people by the government or some political parties. We can find the term ’’political regime’’ in some politicians’ public presentations, in news programmes, discussions in political meetings ( parliament) and so on. For example I would like to tell you about Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a head of the Russian liberal-democratic party ’’LDPR’’. His speech was held in the government state and it was about how political regime influences on social behaviour and which consequences it has.

He sad a lot about USSR with their political regime and he sad that in government totalitarian regime made a good results but in social groups, after collapse of USSR, people went on the streets to judge previous regime because during totalitarianism many families were suffering from repressions. In his speech he uses the term “political regime” a few times, but he uses it almost in its full extent to describe the situation that he needs.

But most of all, the term “political regime” used by scientists directly associated with such Sciences as political science, sociology, history, philosophy, psychology and so on. On their part the knowledge of this term should not be just flawless and the most profound and professional in all aspects in order to best understand what was going on because scientific work must be absolutely accurate. Well, why scientists, unlike ordinary people and politicians use the term at the highest level.

As an example, the use of the term scientist, I would like to give the work “the Political regime of the modern Russian state» which was written by Zarema Stash. For example, this operation we can see that the perception of the person from the world of science differs from the perception of people from other areas. In the beginning she puts forward the definition of “Political regime”, explains the types and characteristics of the term and all its work is based practically on this term.

By the end, we can see that Zarema Stash very professionally and thoroughly employed the term in her dissertation. This term is actively used in mass media to describe any situations in the world associated with the political regime. Journalists of site FB. ru undertook a complete review of the political regime in North Korea and wrote about this very interesting article. In this article they explained that in this country occurs, as citizens living there, what freedom they have, how is the governance of the country and most importantly, how it all affects the totalitarian political regime.

References

Санжаревский И.И.’’Политическая наука: Словарь-Справочник’’. 2010.http://glos.virmk.ru
P. Schmitter and G. O’Donnell.’’Transitions from Authoritarian Rule’’. 2013. 96P.
Мельвиль А.Ю.’’Политология’’.2008. 618P.
Жириновский В.В. ’’Торжественное открытие V Рождественских парламентских встреч в рамках XXV Международных Рождественских образовательных чтений’’.2017.http://www.duma.gov.ru/analytics/tv/chairman-statements/1853657/
Сташ Зарема Кималовна.Кандидат юридических наук.’’Политический режим современного Российского государства’’.2009.http://www.dissercat.com/content/politicheskii-rezhim-sovremennogo-rossiiskogo-gosudarstva 31P.
http://fb.ru/article/194508/politicheskiy-rejim-severnoy-korei-priznaki-totalitarizma-politicheskiy-stroy-severnoy-korei 2015.