Using Microcomputers To Choose Among Government Structures

Abstract

A microcomputer program called Policy/Goal Percentaging is now available for process ing a set of (1) political goals to be achieved, (2) government structures or other alterna tives for achieving them and (3) relations between goals and alternatives in order to choose the best alternative or combination for maximizing societal benefits minus societal costs. It is called Policy/Goal Percentaging because it relates policies to goals and because it uses part or whole percentaging to deal with the goals being measured on different dimensions. The government structures analyzed in this article include (1) democracy-dictatorship, (2) federalism-unitary government, (3) parliamentary-presidential government, (4) judicial review and (5) alternative party systems. The microcomputer program shows how tenta tive conclusions might change as a result of values in the weights of the goals or the alterna tive scores on the goals. This kind of analysis helps to choose among the alternative government structures and to obtain a better understanding of why some societies prefer one structural form over another.