2. Answer the following questions.

   1. Explain why the study of governmental structures should be ap­proached with great caution.

   2. Compare the roles of monarchs in the parliamentary democracies of Western Europe and in the emerging states of North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.

   3. Why were the most successful German, Austrian and Russian roy­al dynasties fated to lose their thrones?

   4. Why are some kings of the non-Western world nowadays consid­ered to be rather monocrats than monarchs?

   5. What is the main feature of oligarchic rule in pre-industrial societies?

   6. Speak of the new forms of oligarchic rule in advanced industrial societies.

   7. What does “democracy” imply? What forms of democracy have been known by humanity?

   8. What is the essence of constitutionalism?

   9. Speak of the main functions of political parties in a constitutional democracy.

   10. What are the two major types of constitutional democracy in the modem world?

   11. What is the difference between the American and the British con­stitutional democracies?

3. Decide whether the following statements are true or false:

   1. The fact that two states have similar constitutions with similar in­stitutional provision means that they represent the same type of po­litical system.

   2. Ancient traditional classification of political systems is very descriptive of political life today.

   3. The role of the king in some emerging states of North Africa, the Middle East and Asia has much in common with that of dictators in autocratic regimes.

   4. Many dynasties which continued to rule as well as to reign at the beginning of the 20th century were successful enough to survive to modern times in Europe.

   5. The status of monarchy in the parliamentary democracies of modern Europe has been reduced to the status of a dignified insti­tutional facade entirely lacking in power.

   6. The kings who in modern times maintain their position by the claim of legitimate blood descent are called monocrats.

   7. According to Aristotelian classification of government, oligarchy is a debased form of aristocracy.

   8. The simple forms of oligarchic rule based on recruiting elites from a ruling class are still persisting unchanged in advanced industrial societies.

   9. Oligarchy is the phenomenon of irresponsible rule by small groups of people.

   10. Constitutional government in England has always been associated with forms of mass participation in politics.

   11. The key point of modern constitutional democracies is the will of the majority of the people expressed in free elections.

   12. The British parliamentary system provides for the separation of legislature and executive.

Text seven

Read and translate the following text without a dictionary.

Few states in the modern world have constitutional arrangements that are more than a century old. Indeed, the vast majority of all the world’s states have constitutions written in the 20th century. This is true of states such as Germany, Italy, and Japan that were defeated in World War II and of other states, such as the successor states of the Soviet Union, Spain, and China, that have experienced civil war and revolutions in the course of the century. Great Britain and the United States are almost alone among major contemporary nation-states in possessing constitutional arrangements that predate the 20th century.

The prestige of constitutional democracy was once so great that many thought all the countries of the world would eventually accede to the examples of the United States or Great Britain and establish similar arrangements. However, the collapse of the Weimar Constitu­tion in Germany in the 1930s and the recurrent political crises of the Fourth Republic in France after World War II suggested that constitu­tional democracy carries no guarantee of stability. The failure of both presidential and parliamentary systems to work as expected in less-advanced countries that modelled their constitutions on those of the United States and Britain resulted in a further diminution in the pres­tige of both systems. Functioning examples are located throughout the world, though these are generally poorly institutionalized outside of those countries with direct historical ties to Western Europe. Japan is a notable exception to this generalization, as are Costa Rica, India, and several other states to a lesser degree.

Curious enough that even in Britain and the United States, the 20th century has seen much change in the governmental system. In the United States, for example, the relationship of legislature and ex­ecutive at both the national and the state levels has been significantly altered by the growth of bureaucracies and the enlargement of the ex­ecutive’s budgetary powers. In Britain, even far more reaching chang­es have occurred in the relationship between the prime minister and Parliament and in Parliament’s role in supervising the executive es­tablishment. In both countries, the appearance of the welfare state, the impact of modern technology on the economy, and international crises have resulted in major alterations in the ways in which the insti­tutions of government function and interact.

The adoption of new constitutions is also a major aspect of polit­ical change in almost all of the states of Eastern Europe. All sys­tems, moreover, even without formal constitutional change, undergo a continual process of adjustment and mutation as their institutional arrangements respond to and reflect changes in the social order and the balance of political forces.