Forms of Government Organization

Various governmental structures and methods of organization are present throughout the globe, each with its own positive and negative attributes. Some methods may have been more successfully employed than others, but nevertheless, such models exist. Those who study political science and international government often find that governments rarely adhere to the strict, rigid definitions of the governmental structures, but rather choose to form their own, unique ideologies through a mixture/combination of models. Political scientists classify governments based on how power is geographically distributed, how the executive and legislative branches interact, and the size of the body that governs.

Three fundamental models of government that display the geographic distribution of power include: unitary government, federal, and confederate government. Unitary government, as its name suggests, exist when the power is allocated to a sole, central organization. This organization has the sole disgression of how, if, to allocate power to subordinates. Federal governments offer a division of power between a national government and other regional governments. Typically, federal governments have a written constitution to guide its division of power. Confederate govenrments, to the contrary of unitary and federal governments, allocate the power to regional governments and little power to a weak, central government. like the United States originally was, a confederacy is a loose coalition of independent, sovereign states/provinces. The only remaining confederacy in the world today, is called the Commonwealth of Independent States, which is a coalition among twelve of the fifteen former Soviet Union republics.

The way in which the legislative and executive branches interact can be described in two classifications: presidential and parliamentary governments.