Ethnocracy is a form of government where all offices are held by a certain ethnic group purposefully and the other ethnic groups are subdued and sometimes killed by the state because of their race or cultural differences. This type of government is extremely racist. Ethnocracy can also be a political regime which, in contrast to democracy, is instituted on the basis of qualified rights to citizenship, and with ethnic affiliation (defined in terms of race, descent, religion, or language) as the distinguishing principle. The raison d'être of the ethnocracy is to secure that the most important instruments of state power are controlled by a specific ethnic collectivity. All other considerations concerning the distribution of power are ultimately subordinated to this basic intention. An ethnic group is a group of people who identify with one another, or are so identified by others, on the basis of a boundary that distinguishes them from other groups. ... A race is a population of humans distinguished from other populations. ... An African-American drinks out of a water fountain marked for colored in 1939 at a street car terminal in Oklahoma City. ...

Ethnocracies are characterised by their control system – the legal, institutional, and physical instruments of power deemed necessary to secure ethnic dominance. The degree of system discrimination will tend to vary greatly from case to case and from situation to situation. If the dominant group (whose interests the system is meant to serve and whose identity it is meant to represent) constitutes a small minority (20% or less) of the population within the state territory, extreme degrees of institutionalised suppression will probably be necessary to sustain the status quo. The other side of the coin might well be a system of full-fletched democracy (inclusive and competitive in Robert Dahl's terminology) for the privileged population, making up what Pierre van den Berghe (1981) calls "Herrenvolk democracy" (with reference to apartheid South Africa). This is a system of ethnocracy which offers democratic participation to the dominant group only. Aphorism Critical legal studies Jurisprudence Law (principle) Legal research Letter versus Spirit List of legal abbreviations Legal code Natural justice Natural law Philosophy of law Religious law External links Find more information on Law by searching one of Wikipedias sibling projects: Wikibooks Wikiversity has more about this subject: School...

South Africa

Ethnocracy indicates a specific principle of power-distribution in a society. In his book Power-Sharing in South Africa ISBN 0877255245, Arend Lijphart classifies contemporary constitutional proposals for a solution to the conflict in South Africa into four categories: Arend DEngremont Lijphart (b. ...

• majoritarian (one man, one vote)
• non-democratic (varieties of white domination)
• partitionist (creating new political entities)
• consociational (power-sharing by propotional representation and elite accommodation) (1985:5)

Not surprisingly, Lijphart argues strongly in favour of the consociational model and his categories illustrates that, on the constitutional level, state power can be distributed along two dimensions: Legal-institutional and territorial.

Along the legal-institutional dimension we can distinguish between singularism (power centralised according to membership in a specific group), pluralism (power-distribution among defined groups according to relative numerical strength), and universalism (power-distribution without any group-specific qualifications). The three main alternatives on the territorial dimension are the unitary state, "intermediate restructuring" (within one formal sovereignty), and partition (creating separate political entities).