Regime Change Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

A political regime consists of the chief institutions by which the state exercises its authority. Regime change is a fundamental alteration in these institutions. It occurs when there is the wholesale replacement of one set of institutions by another, such as the replacement of communist regimes by democratic regimes in eastern Europe following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Regime change normally involves an existing constitution being repudiated and a new and different constitution adopted.

An alternative use of the term regime focuses on processes of interaction between political actors that cut across institutions. This usage is especially common in discussions of international political economy and security. However, this second use of the term creates confusion between clearly identifiable institutional structures and patterns of interaction between groups and categories of people, such as bankers. The term is thus best used to discuss governments and their institutions.

Regimes can come and go while the state remains. The French state is many centuries old but since the French Revolution (1789–1799) it has had more than ten different regimes. Its current regime dates from 1958. A regime does not change when a general election alters the party in control of government. In the United States, this is referred to as a change in administration, for example, from the Bush to the Obama administrations. In a stable undemocratic regime, control of government changes hands through decisions of an elite clique, such as the military junta or the central committee of a one-party state.

The reform of a major institution to adapt it to new political circumstances is not a complete regime change. In the People’s Republic of China, the communist regime is promoting economic reforms but resisting political reforms that it fears could destroy its one-party regime. Regime change occurred in the Soviet Union when reform initiatives by Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s got out of hand. The introduction of direct election of United States senators by the seventeenth amendment to the constitution in 1913 altered the composition of Congress but did not alter the institutions of the regime set out in the 1789 American Constitution. To describe as a regime change, a shift from one party controlling both the White House and Congress to control of the two institutions being divided between Republicans and Democrats ignores the difference between changes that take place within a constitution and those that involve substituting one constitutional structure for another.

Regimes can take many forms, democratic or undemocratic. These include military rule, personal dictatorships, one-party regimes that use totalitarian ideologies and force to maintain their authority and regimes in which rulers are restrained by the rule of law but are not democratic, such as Singapore today, or Britain and Sweden in the nineteenth century.

The process of regime change can involve an evolutionary change from an undemocratic to a democratic regime, as occurred in northern Europe and Anglo-American countries, or an abrupt change; for example, democratization in Spain following the death of General Franco in 1975. Some European countries have experienced dramatic transitions between democratic and undemocratic regimes. In the twentieth century, Germans have been successively governed by an undemocratic imperial regime; the democratic Weimar Republic; a Nazi regime under Adolf Hitler; by a division between the democratic Federal Republic and a communist regime in East Germany; and since 1990 by a united and democratic Federal Republic. Regime change also can take the form of an alternation between dictatorships, as tends to happen in the Middle East.

Regime change can occur as a consequence of peaceful evolutionary change, a military coup, a quarrel between elites who fall out in a struggle for the succession after the death of a dictator, or as a result of a war of independence, as in the American Revolution (1775–1783), or a civil war. The contemporary map of central and eastern Europe reflects the coexistence of changes in the boundaries of states as well as of regimes. When the communist regime of the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, its constituent parts broke up into fifteen independent states with different types of regimes, ranging from democracies in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to very undemocratic regimes in Tajikistan and Turkmenistan.

Changes in the regime of a powerful country has major implications for international security and foreign aid. If the new regime is democratic, this can be prematurely hailed as a gain for greater international stability, while if a new regime is undemocratic, this can cause democratic states to become anxious about its potential for supporting actions disrupting international affairs.

Bibliography:

Easton, David. A Systems Analysis of Political Life. New York: Wiley, 1965.
Huntington, Samuel P. The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991.
Krasner, Stephen D. “Structural Causes and Regime Consequences: Regimes as Intervening Variables.” International Organization 36 (1982): 185–205.
Lake, David A. “The State and International Relations.” In The Oxford Handbook of International Relations, edited by Christian Reus-Smit and Duncan Snidal, 41–61. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Rose, Richard. “Democracy and Its Alternatives.” In Democratization, edited by Christopher W. Haerpfer, Patrick Bernhagen, Ronald F. Inglehart, and Christian Welzel, 10–23. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

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