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Governments - Governments, Authority and Power

4 important questions on Governments - Governments, Authority and Power

When we talk about political authority, we do not just mean power to impose decisions. Authority is over that claims legitimacy =

The perception of something as rightful and appropriate, regardless of whether it is liked.

According to Max Weber, leaders assert that their authority is morally right for three kinds of reasons:

Traditional legitimacy. When practices persist for a long time, people often see respect for them as a part of their identity.
Charismatic legitimacy. Refers to that peculiar quality of leaders or elegant concepts to which people are drawn.
Rational-legal legitimacy. Assigns authority by undertaking a process that is understood to be reasonable.

The spread of democracy happened in three main waves:

1. First wave: the rise of democratic governments in North America and Europe as a result of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries' spread of Enlightenment ideas.
2. Second wave: After WWII, install democracies in places like West Germany, Italy and Japan, and some Latin American countries.
3. Third wave: began in Spain and Greece at the end of the 1970s, not until then did democratic government take permanent hold.
(4. Fourth wave? Many people saw the 'Arab Spring' movements in 2011 as hopeful signs of new expansion, so far stable democracy had not taken hold in any of these countries.)

During the first wave, Enlightenment philosophers thought that if people were similarly rational, they all deserved similar rights and treatment. Such thinking led to two new notions:

- the rule of law: the principle that laws are systematically and neutrally applied, including ti two political leaders, and that law itself regulates how laws are made and changed.
- kings were pressured to agree to constitutions: a fundamental document that defines rights and processes to limit what government can do.