Types of Government: Forms of State vs. Forms of Government

Someone who says “Italy is a parliamentary republic” is actually talking about two different things at once, without realizing it. According to Treccani, a form of state is “the different ways in which a state’s three constitutive elements — people, territory and government — combine,” while a type of government is “the different ways in which political direction is exercised among a country’s constitutional bodies.” The first is about the nature of the state as a whole, the second is only about the relationship among the bodies that run it, and the two axes can shift independently of each other.

The oldest split among types of government, per Treccani, is Machiavelli’s division between monarchies and republics. Earlier still, though, Aristotle had proposed a finer criterion, based on the number of people who hold power. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on Aristotle’s political thought notes that the philosopher distinguished six possible constitutional forms, a classification “doubtless adapted from Plato’s Statesman,” and that the dividing line wasn’t purely a headcount: a constitution was correct when it aimed at the common advantage, deviant when it served only those in power.

Number of rulers	Correct form	Deviant form
One person	Kingship	Tyranny
A few	Aristocracy	Oligarchy
The many	Polity	Democracy

Worked example: calling a government “democratic” isn’t enough for Aristotle to call it good. In his classification, democracy is the deviant version of rule by the many, the one where the majority chases its own advantage; the correct version of that same rule by the many, the one aimed at the common good, is what he called polity.

Forms of state through history

On the historical axis, Treccani traces four forms of state across the centuries: “the patrimonial state (16th-17th century), the police state (18th century), the liberal state or rule-of-law state (19th century) and the democratic state (20th century).” Each phase reflects a different way of framing the relationship between rulers and the ruled, moving from a sovereign’s private accumulation of wealth to the recognition of rights and legal limits on public power.

Alongside that timeline sits a second, independent distinction: the territorial one. A state can be unitary, with a single center of legislative power, or federal, with multiple layers of government that each hold their own areas of competence. Treccani explicitly lists “federal states and unitary states” among the forms of state, next to the classification by historical era.

Types of government today

Among contemporary types of government, the Treccani entry names five: “parliamentary, presidential, constitutional monarchy, directorial and semi-presidential.” In a parliamentary system, the executive must hold the confidence of the legislative assembly to stay in office. In a presidential system, the head of state is elected independently of parliament and also runs the government. A constitutional monarchy keeps a monarch as head of state but pairs the crown with representative bodies that exercise political direction. The remaining two, directorial and semi-presidential, are worth a concrete example each, since they are the least common and the easiest to mix up.

The directorial system survives today in essentially one place: Switzerland. The Swiss federal government is the Federal Council, a seven-member body — the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs’ page for an international audience puts it plainly, “le gouvernement suisse se compose de sept membres égaux en droit” (the Swiss government is made up of seven members with equal standing). Decisions belong to the whole council, not to any one person, and the official federal government site states it bluntly: “the Federal Council reaches its decisions as a collegial body.” Anyone who sits on it must then defend those decisions in public even when they don’t personally agree, since “all Federal Council members must stand by the decisions in their external dealings, even if a decision may not accord with their personal views or the policy of their party.”

Worked example: in a single year, Switzerland’s Federal Council decides “some 2,500 items of business,” according to admin.ch. No one of the seven members could get through a workload like that alone: the business is split across each member’s department, but it’s always signed off together by the council.

The Federal Council’s makeup follows a mechanism known as the concordance system, under which the main parties govern together instead of trading places between majority and opposition: “en vertu du système de concordance, les partis de tous bords sont appelés à collaborer au sein du gouvernement” (under the concordance system, parties across the spectrum are called on to work together inside the government). The same source lists the 2026 split as two seats for the Liberal Party, two for the Social Democrats, two for the Swiss People’s Party and one for the Centre.

The semi-presidential system, by contrast, shows up in France’s Fifth Republic. The Conseil constitutionnel describes the executive as dual, “l’exécutif est bicéphale avec, d’un côté, le Président de la République élu directement par le peuple, de l’autre, le Premier ministre” (the executive is two-headed, with the President elected directly by the people on one side and the Prime Minister on the other). The President doesn’t govern alone: under Article 20 of the Constitution, as cited by the same source, “le Gouvernement détermine et conduit la politique de la Nation” (the Government determines and conducts the nation’s policy), while Article 5 gives the President “un rôle d’arbitre” (an arbitrating role).

	President	Government
Origin	Elected directly by voters	Appointed, also answers to Parliament
Role under the Constitution	Arbitrator (Art. 5)	Determines and conducts the nation’s policy (Art. 20)
Defense	Head of the armed forces	Has the armed forces at its disposal (Art. 20), the Prime Minister is accountable for them (Art. 21)

How much weight one actually carries against the other isn’t settled once and for all in the French Constitution: the same institutional source notes that the balance between President and Prime Minister depends on political circumstances and institutional practice, not on a fixed rule. Readers curious how a similar balancing act between different bodies gets drawn up in another constitution can compare it with the Italian case described in the Recap on the Italian Constitution, where the relationship between Government and Parliament follows its own rules.

The line between monarchy and republic, the oldest according to Treccani, has run through the history of individual states too: Rome, covered in the Recap on the Roman Empire, moved from a kingdom to a republic and finally to an empire, three different forms on the same territory over the course of several centuries. The reasoning that separates the number of rulers from the quality of their rule, meanwhile, was born in the Greek world covered in the Recap on Ancient Greece, where Aristotle wrote his work on politics after observing dozens of city-states with different constitutions. Another historical threshold between forms of state, the one between the 19th-century liberal state and the 20th-century democratic state, sits at the center of the French Revolution story too, which toppled absolute monarchy and paved the way, in the decades that followed, to the Fifth Republic.