Hamelt
Essay Preview: Hamelt
Report this essay
Non-democratic regimes were and still take an important portion of the attention given by worlds political scientists. Non-Democratic Regimes, theory, government and politics is a book written by Paul Brooker, who is a senior lecturer in comparative politics, that aims to provide a wide ranging basis for comparison between non-democratic regimes and democratic ones as well as a thematic analysis of past, present and future non-democratic regimes. The author tackles not only previous theories and analyses adopted by these regimes such as Totalitarianism and Authoritarianism but also focus on modern form of non-democratic regimes mainly dictatorship by one political party or the military. Paul Brooker began his book by two chapter introducing and examining theories of totalitarian and authoritarian forms of modern non-democratic government. Following chapters discuss the join of the army and the party to form a dictatorship and how often they degenerate into a personalist dictatorship. A chapter on government policies and performances compares and contrasts decision-making processes in different non-democratic regimes. The failure of dictatorships is covered after that in a chapter that focuses on the 1970s till 90s wave of democratization while the following chapter tackles semi-democracy and semi-dictatorship. Finally, the author looked at the failure and extinction of dictatorship in the world. This book report will look into each concept and inspect chapters contents in a summarized way.
Theories of Non-Democratic Government
Totalitarianism, authoritarianism and Fascism are theories that are widely recognized. This chapter introduces them deeply in order to persuade the reader and make sure in later chapters that the author and the reader are in pace when the notions of these theories.
This chapter defines totalitarianism as: the term authoritarianism emerged in the 1920s_30s as part of the Fascist ideology in Italy. Mussolini described the Fascist totalitarian state as everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state. Differently saying, the state is the heart and predominant matter. The concept of totalitarianism spread widely in the 1950s among political scientists and was used as antonym of Democracy.
The master piece of Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, represented totalitarianism as an extreme form of dictatorship. This is a narrowed description of some theories of totalitarianism:
Arendt (1951): As a classic theorist he defines Totalitarianism as Political exploitation of the masses created by preceding democracys economic/social crisis or by preceding one-party dictatorship. Totalitarianisms goal is to dominate every individual in every sphere using terrorism through secret police under one leader structure.
Friedrich and Brzezinski (1956): Totalitarianism is an ideology directed toward economic, political, social and cultural evolution using terror and propaganda. The structure of the regime is characterized by one political party, terrorist police, politicization of military and an absolute leader of course.
Shapiro (1972): This latest notion of Totalitarianism in the era of second generation theorist was adopted in Nazi Germany, Communist Soviet Union, China and Cuba. It focuses outward mass enthusiasm and preparation for war or building communism.
The second notion tackled in this chapter is the theories of authoritarianism. According to Brooker, This notion is a virtual synonym for non-democratic government. In a general sense, the term authoritarianism could be said to describe a situation where freedom is restricted in favor of obedience to authority and this latter is exercised under some restrictions. The chapter refers to the pioneering 1964 analysis of authoritarianism by Linz, An Authoritarianism Regime: Spain. Linz focused on regimes that are neither democratic nor totalitarian. He eliminated traditional monarchies and totalitarian regimes from his conception of authoritarianism. On the other hand he highlighted the role played by military. According to Linz, military enjoyed privileged states and therefore, unlike Totalitarian regimes, played a crucial role in the structure of the authoritarianism theories.
Types of Non-Democratic regime
In this chapter non-democratic governments are analyzed according to three main types, military, party or personalist.
Typology of One-Party systems
This chapter summarizes the contribution of Huntington, Authoritarian politics in Modern society: The dynamics of Established One-Part Systems. According to Huntington, one party system could be defined as a political system in which there was only one effective party. Other parties have negligible effect on the decision making process. He classified one-party non-systems as follow:
The revolutionary one-party system
The exclusionary one-party system
The established one-party system
In his analysis, Brooker refers to Huntingtons criteria of distinguishing weak from strong one-party system. Some of these criteria are: legitimation, recruitment of leaders, policy making and interest aggregation.
Typology of Military Dictatorships
Analysts argued that the military type of non-democratic regimes could be subdivided into five categories; to direct two indirect and one dual
Indirect Limited
Indirect Complete
Direct
Direct: quasi-civilianized
Typology of Personalist systems
Brooker, the author of this book did agree with Webers typology of legitimate rule but with few adaptations. The typology classified this kind of non-democratic regimes into three types:
Traditional (personal)
Charismatic
Legal-Rational (impersonal)
In the case of traditional type, obedience is kind of owned to the person of the chief or monarch. In the case of charismatic type, the person is obeyed because of personal trust. This latter is believed to dispose