AP Human Geography 4.7: Forms of Governance

Every state has to settle where its power sits. The two forms of governance this course studies are unitary and federal.

In a unitary state, the central government holds the power. The country is divided into provinces or districts, but those units exist to carry out national decisions. The central government creates them, gives them their tasks, and can redraw them or take their tasks away.

In a federal state, a constitution divides power between the national government and regional governments, often called states or provinces. Each regional government has its own lawmaking body and powers of its own, such as over schools, police or local roads, and the national government cannot take those powers away on its own.

Both forms have internal units with names on the map, so the units alone tell you nothing. Ask who gives the units their power. If it comes from the center and the center can take it back, the state is unitary. If the constitution guarantees it, the state is federal.

In the picture at the top of the page, Country A is drawn as a unitary state and Country B as a federal state.

A unitary state tends to have a top-down, centralized form of governance. Decisions are made in the capital and passed down through national ministries to regional and district offices, whose officials carry them out.

That shapes the country's spatial organization in ways you can see:

• One main center of power. The national lawmaking body, the top courts and the head offices of government agencies cluster in the capital.
• Uniform policy. A law or a school curriculum set in the capital usually applies the same way in every part of the country, so crossing from one province into the next changes little about the rules.
• Administrative units. Internal boundaries are drawn to run services, and the center can redraw them when it reorganizes.

Take hypothetical Country Lund. Its education ministry, in the capital, sets the exams every student takes, in the same week, in every district. Each district office hires teachers and runs the schools, but it follows the ministry's rules and cannot write its own.

Centralized power lets a national plan reach every district at once. The cost is distance: people far from the capital can feel that their region's needs come last.

A federal state has more locally based, dispersed power centers. The national capital is one center, and each state or province has its own capital, lawmaking body and courts. Power is spread across the map instead of gathered in one city.

That gives a federal state a different spatial organization:

• Several capitals. Government offices, jobs and political attention are spread among the regional capitals as well as the national one.
• Laws that change at internal boundaries. Where states set their own rules, a short drive across a state line can change a tax rate, the age to get a driver's license or what schools teach.
• Boundaries with weight. An internal boundary in a federal state marks the edge of a government with real powers, so it is usually much harder to redraw than an administrative line.

Take hypothetical Country Brask, a federal state of six states. Each state sets its own minimum wage. A company choosing where to build a warehouse compares six sets of rules, which it would not need to do in Country Lund.

The cost of dispersed power is that rules vary, and the national government cannot carry out every plan everywhere at once.

This part is background. It helps you explain why a country might have its form, but it is not how you identify the form. A state's form of governance is tied to its geography, though no rule decides it.

Federal states tend to be found where the territory is large, or where distinct groups live in different regions. Spreading power to regional governments puts decisions closer to people who live far from the national capital, and it can let a region whose people differ from the rest of the country, in language or way of life, govern matters such as schooling in its own way.

Unitary states tend to be found where the territory is smaller, or where people share a language and culture across the country. With fewer regional differences to manage, one set of national rules can serve everyone.

These are tendencies, not tests. A large country can be unitary, and a small one can be federal. A unitary state can also hand some powers to elected regional councils while keeping the right to take them back, and it stays unitary. It is less centralized, though, than a unitary state whose regions only carry out the center's orders.

So when you read about a country, use its size and its people to explain why it might have chosen its form. Use where its regions' powers come from to say which form it has.