preview

Regime Of The Military Regime

Better Essays

Military Regime: A military regime is a form of government wherein political power resides with the armed forces (McGuigan, 2003). The military is the power-holding group that centralizes political and legal authority (Clapham and Philip, 1985). Military regimes, however, cannot simply be classified as governments dominated by the military, because they are seldom purely military in composition. Civilian bureaucrats and politicians generally play a role in the government, but the military always has the final say. The presence of civilians in military governments shows that military elites do not necessarily organize military regimes. Nevertheless, a military regime is always headed by a military officer, active or retired, with the support of the military establishment, and the political structure includes routine mechanisms for high-level military officers to influence policy and political appointments. …show more content…

the form of democracy practiced in ancient Greek city-states. The nature of democracy in most modern societies has elicited many other definitions of democracy. In the words of Sithole (1994:153) “democracy is a form of governance in which the supreme power or authority in a society is vested in the people and that power is exercised by the people directly or indirectly through an institutionalized system of representation involving periodically held free and fair elections”. Beetham (1995:55) also asserted that democracy is a “mode of decision-making about collectively binding rules and policies over which the people exercise control and the most democratic arrangement to be that where all members of the collective enjoy effective equal rights to take part in such decision making directly - one, that is to say, which realizes to the greatest conceivable degree the principles of popular control and equality in its exercise...”. According to Powell (1982:6), the basic features of democracy

Get Access