POLI 212 Lecture Notes - Lecture 14: Collectively Exhaustive Events, Autocracy, Liberal Democracy
28 Oct 2014
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Document Summary
Our working definition of a regime: the rules of the political game, the allocation of power and authority among political offices and agencies, formal rules imply some kind of codification, such as a written constitution. Informal rules or conventions also are possible, these are practices that evolve over time and are accepted as conventions or norms which shape political expectations and behavior. An ambiguity about regimes: there is nothing in this working definition which tells us over whom these rules are to legitimately apply. This ambiguity is resolved when we recognize that regimes are typically associated with states. For our purposes, the boundaries of regimes are typically the boundaries of states. Formal and informal mechanisms of political representation. A regime is not a government, in other words. There is something more basic about a political regime: a regime sets the rules under which political actors compete.
