Classifying government

In political science, it has long been a goal to create a taxonomy or typology of political regimes, as typologies of political systems are not obvious. It is particularly important in the fields of political science of comparative politics and international relations.
On the surface, identifying a form of government that seems to be easy, because all governments have an official version. The United States is a federal republic, while the former Soviet Union was a socialist republic. However self-identification is not objective, and Kopstein and Lichbach support, defining regimes can be tricky.For for example, elections are an essential feature of democracy, [citation needed], but in practice elections in the former Soviet Union were not "free and fair" and took place in a one-party state. Thus, in many practical classifications, it would not be considered democratic.
Identification of a form of government is also complicated because a large number of political systems from socio-economic movements and are then transported to the governments of specific parties named after these movements, all with competing political ideologies. Experience with those movements in power, and the close relationship they may have particular forms of government, can cause them to be regarded as forms of government themselves.
Other complications are non-consensus or deliberate "bias or partiality" technical definitions reasonable political ideologies and related forms of corporate governance, due to the nature of politics in the modern era. For example: The meaning of "conservatism" of the United States has little in common with the way the definition of this word is used elsewhere. As Ribuffo (2011) notes that "what Americans now call conservatism much of the world called liberalism or neo-liberalism. Since the conservatism of the 1950s the United States was mainly associated with the Republican Party. However, at the time of segregation many Southern Democrats were conservative, and they played a key role in the conservative coalition that controlled the Congress from 1937 to 1963. "
Every country in the world is governed by a system of governance which involves at least two (or more) of the following attributes (eg, the United States is not a true capitalist society, since the government does provide social services its citizens). In addition, the opinion of a person's type of government may differ from one another (for example, some argue that the United States is a plutocracy rather than a democracy because they may believe that it is governed by rich). There are always shades of gray in any government. Even the most liberal democracies restrict political activity rival to one degree or another, and even the most tyrannical dictatorships must organize a broad base of support, it is very difficult to "categorize" each government in narrow categories.

The federal government is classifying information at a rapidly increasing pace, and every time the CIA, FBI or National Security Agency stamps a document "Top Secret," it's risking the public's right to know, says a report released Thursday by the Public Interest Declassification Board.

The current classification system, the board concluded, is "fraught with problems. In its mission to support national security, it keeps too many secrets, and keeps them too long; it is overly complex; it obstructs desirable information sharing inside of government and with the public."

The board, an official body of academics, ex-spys and transparency experts appointed by the president and Congress, does not have the power to force changes. Only the president, it says, has the power to force agencies to end an overly cautious culture of secrecy. But non-governmental organizations have questioned the administration's commitment to transparency, citing its prosecution of people who have leaked confidential documents to the press.

The National Archives have a declassification backlog of 400 million pages just for documents older than 25 years. And as computers suck up more data, the problem is getting worse. At one unnamed intelligence agency, the board found, the equivalent of 20 million four-drawer filing cabinets filled with text is classified every 18 months.

What we lose, said Nancy Soderberg, the board's chair, is "a much more rich understanding of some of the decisions of the U.S. government" as well as whistleblowers who could expose government misdeeds, since "you go to jail if you leak classified information ... most government employees don't want to break the law."

That will not change without an aggressive plan coming from the very top, she said. "Unless the White House really drives these issues, the overwhelming tendency to protect the status quo will kick in."

The White House asked the board to conduct its study of classification procedures in the first place. In November, the president signed into law a bill strengthening whistleblower protections for most government employees. At the same time, however, the administration took a hard line against those who blow the whistle outside of what it considered the proper channels.

As the lawyer for Pfc. Bradley Manning noted on Monday, while the president was signing that new whistleblower bill into law, military prosecutors were facing off in court against his client, who is accused of sending sensitive State Department cables to WikiLeaks. The Obama administration, moreover, has prosecuted more people for leaking classified information under the Espionage Act than all its predecessors combined.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment Friday afternoon.

Angela Canterbury, director of public policy for the Project on Government Oversight, argued that the smarter approach toward classification and declassification recommended by the board must be combined with a more enlightened attitude toward whistleblowers who go to the press.

"There are lots of ways to blow the whistle, and this president has done a lot to strengthen protections, particularly for those who use internal channels," she said.

But, she added, "I think there's a great concern that people are going to be punished for revealing information that never should have been marked classified in the first place."

The president should start by taking up the Public Interest Declassification Board's recommendations on classification, she said. And then it should go a step further by considering whether and how aggressively it needs to prosecute those who leak in the public interest.

"I think that certainly we have to take into account the public's interest in all disclosures, including unauthorized disclosures of classified information," she said. "It is deeply worrying that currently this administration's approach to these public disclosures is not to weigh and balance the interest of the public with potential harm, but it looks like a witch hunt."