POLITICAL SYSTEMS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Monarchy is a form of government in which authority is held by a single person, a monarch, whose right to rule is generally hereditary and lifelong. At the start of the twentieth century, monarchs ruled over most of the world, but by the middle of the century, only a handful remained. A series of revolutions in the preceding centuries had weakened the European monarchies, and while monarchs remained symbols of national unity, real power had passed to constitutional assemblies. Monarchy survived as a form in Europe only where the king or queen functioned as the symbolic head of a parliamentary state, as in Britain, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia. It lasted longer in the few small states of Asia and Africa that had never come under direct colonial rule. By the 1960s, autocratic monarchy had become an outdated form of government. Throughout most of the world, people were considered citizens, not subjects, and the totality of the people were seen as constituting the state.

In most states where monarchical authority was removed, some form of liberal democracy took its place. A liberal democracy is a state where political authority rests in the people acting through elected representatives and where an elected executive is responsible to the will of the people as a whole. The term applies to a broad group of states with a parliamentary or representative political tradition. Liberal democracies differ from the communist states known as people’s democracies, in which the Communist party holds the ultimate authority. Generally, liberal democracies follow the parliamentary pattern, with the executive power vested in a cabinet responsible to the parliament and drawn from the majority party or combination of parties. In the United States, an independently elected executive, the president, functions separately from the legislative authority, the congress.

The doctrine that all of the people had effective authority, or sovereignty, became the basis for the functioning of democratic states. This doctrine of popular sovereignty became all-inclusive as citizenship rights were extended to classes formerly excluded and to women. The liberal democratic state claimed the right to control every aspect of human life according to the will of the people, except where limits on state control were directly stated in a bill of rights in a democratic constitution and recognized in practice.

完整版题目和答案请付费后查阅：