Government is the means by which a society organizes and allocates authority in order to accomplish collective goals and provide benefits that the society as a whole needs. These may include economic prosperity, secure national borders, or a high level of education and health care. Governments are also tasked with protecting common goods such as clean air and water.
Because private businesses are unlikely to protect a nation from a foreign attack or develop its own education system, these activities are often assigned to governments. Governments also make laws that regulate business and protect consumers. For example, they might restrict the amount of toxic gases that can be emitted from factories or require companies to label the contents of their products. They may also create rules that limit the advertising of certain drugs or restrict what a newspaper can publish. The type of government that a country chooses depends on its ideals.
The most basic function of any form of government is to select, or appoint, people to govern it. In a democracy, the citizens directly select members of their group to be part of the governing body, known as the citizenry or the public. This occurs through elections or by selecting a small number of randomly selected citizens, called sortition. The citizenry then participates in a deliberative process to select a governing body, such as a legislature or jury.
Depending on the structure of a government, the power to govern is vested in one person (an autocracy), an elite group of people (an aristocracy), or the citizens as a whole (a democracy). In the latter case, citizens exercise their power through voting and deliberation, or they may have limited choice when it comes to selecting the governing body, such as in a parliamentary democracy.
Governments are organized into three arms to create a check and balance for each other: the executive branch, legislature, and judiciary. James Madison argued that since it would be impossible to ensure that politicians are angels who never attempt to grab more power than they should, the best way to control them was to divide their powers among different branches of government.
At the state level, representatives elected by the people meet in a bicameral legislature made up of two chambers. The smaller upper chamber is usually called the Senate, and the larger lower chamber is usually referred to as the House of Representatives. In addition to making state laws, the legislatures are responsible for distributing funds to government agencies in the form of budgets.
The state governments, which are usually tasked with overseeing local affairs, allocate money to state colleges and universities, police departments, parks, libraries, and other services. They may also be responsible for a wide range of other tasks that vary by state. They may have to deal with things as diverse as managing natural resources, preserving historic sites, and regulating the financial industry.