Basic Concepts: State, Power and Legitimacy

What you need to know

• A state has four essential attributes: a defined territory, a permanent population, a government, and sovereignty. Remove any one and what remains is not a state. A refugee camp has people but no territory of its own; a colony has territory, population and a government but no sovereignty.
• A nation is a group of people bound by common ancestry, language, culture, history or shared sentiment. Nigeria is one state containing many nations: Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Fulani, Tiv, Ijaw, Kanuri and hundreds more. A nation-state is the rare case where the two coincide fairly closely, as in Japan or Somalia.
• Government means three different things depending on context: the institution that makes and enforces rules, the group of people currently holding office, and the process of governing itself. In an exam answer, say which sense you are using.
• Sovereignty is supreme, final and absolute authority within a territory, subject to no higher power internally or externally. Internal sovereignty is supremacy over all persons and associations inside the state; external sovereignty is independence from the control of any other state.
• Sovereignty is in theory absolute, indivisible, permanent and inalienable, but in practice it is limited by international treaties, membership of bodies such as ECOWAS and the UN, international public opinion, the constitution itself, and the economic pressure of lenders and trading partners.
• Locations of sovereignty are distinguished in exam answers: legal sovereignty lies with the body legally empowered to make binding law, political sovereignty lies with the electorate who can remove that body, and popular sovereignty is the doctrine that ultimate power belongs to the people.
• Power is the ability to influence or control the behaviour of others, with or without their consent, and it can rest on force, wealth, knowledge, numbers or office. An armed robber has power over his victim.
• Authority is the right to exercise power, recognised and accepted by those over whom it is exercised. A policeman and an armed robber may both have the power to stop your car; only the policeman has the authority. Authority is power clothed in right.
• Max Weber classified authority into three types: traditional authority resting on long-accepted custom, as with an Oba or Emir; charismatic authority resting on the personal magnetism of a leader; and legal-rational authority resting on rules and the office a person occupies, which is the basis of modern bureaucracy.
• Legitimacy is the general acceptance by the people that a government has the right to rule. A government may hold power without legitimacy, as military regimes that seize power by coup usually do until they win some measure of acceptance.
• Legitimacy is acquired through a free and fair election, through constitutional succession, through long and peaceful exercise of power, through performance that satisfies the people, and through recognition by other states and international bodies.
• Political socialisation is the lifelong process by which people acquire political values and attitudes, and its agents are the family, the school, religious bodies, peer groups, the mass media and political parties themselves.
• Political culture is the pattern of beliefs and attitudes a people holds towards its political system. Nigeria's is often described as a mixed or parochial-participant culture, with high voter mobilisation at elections sitting alongside weak day-to-day civic engagement.
• Other recurring concepts you must be able to define sharply: a nation-state, a society, a community, a constitution, democracy, the rule of law, the separation of powers, representative government, and accountability. The examiner often asks you to define two and distinguish them.