What is government?
We the People: A Concise Introduction to American Politics, 3rd Edition, by Thomas E. Patterson, p.13 "What is government? What is its purpose? It might be thought that the answer to these age-old questions is that government is a means by which people work together to solve their common problems. To be sure, government can serve the collective good. But it can also serve the naked interests of a few, as in the case of Stalin's Russia, Hitler's Germany, or Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
Government can be defined as consisting of the institutions, processes, and rules that are designed to facilitate control of a particular geographic area and its inhabitants. [17] There are only two things that all governments have in common. One is a capacity to raise revenues, usually in the form of taxation, to support government activities. The other is coercion -- the ability to compel inhabitants to abide by the government's rules. Without these capacities, a government would be unable to exercise control over the territory and inhabitants it claims to rule.
Those who decide issues are said to have power, a term that refers to the ability of persons or institutions to control policy decisions. [18] Power is a basic concept of politics. Power determines which interests will decide policy. Those who have sufficient power can impose taxes, permit or prohibit abortions, protect or take private property, provide or refuse welfare benefits, impose or relax trade barriers. With so much at stake, it is perhaps not surprising that power is widely sought and tightly guarded.
When power is exercised through the laws and institutions of government
the concept of authority applies. Authority can be defined as the recognized right of an individual, organization, or institution to make binding decisions. By this definition, government is not the only source of authority: parents have authority over their children; professors have authority over their students; firms have authority over their employees. However, government is a special case in that its authority is more encompasing in scope and more final in nature. Government's authority extends to all within its geogaphical boundaries. It can be used to redefine the authority of the parent, the professor, or the firm. Government's authority is also the most coercive. It includes the power to arrest and imprison, even to punish by death those who violate its rules.
Government needs coercive power to ensure that its laws will be obeyed, but this power can also be abused. In a perfect world, political power would be used in evenhanded wasys for the benefit of all. but the world is imperfect, and those with power can use it for selfish ends, whether to enrich themselves personally or to advance the interests of their side against all others. 'Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely', was how Lord Acton described the problem.
Although no governing system can assure that power will be applied fairly, the U.S. system strengthens this prospect through an elaborate system of checks and balances. This system includes the division of authority among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. Each branch acts as a check on the power of the others and balances their power by exercising power of its own. Many other democratic countries have no comparable fragmentation of power. Extreme fragmentation of governing authority is a major characteristic of the American political system. This fact, as we will see in subsequent chapters, has profound implications for how politics is conducted, who wins out, and what policies result." |