What form of government is this?

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This is where the leader wants to avoid being involved in the day-to-day affairs of the government, but wants to remain the center of all real political power and avoid becoming a figurehead, and to accomplish this he/she creates top-level positions with overlapping, conflicting, and often poorly defined authority, appoints highly ambitious and competitive individuals to those positions, and sets himself/herself up as the arbiter in disputes between those individuals.

Is there a specific name for this type of government? I know it's highly inefficient, but it does allow the highly lax leader to maintain real power.

It would be a type of autocracy. Autocracies manifest differently, but if, at the end of the day, the one main leader is the supreme be-all and end all, then it would be a type of autocracy.

If his top-level positions are vested in the hands of a select few, that would be an oligarchy. But if he's still numero uno, but uses his cabal to run things, it could be seen as an oligarchical autocracy. (Or perhaps an autocratic oligarchy, but I think oligarchical autocracy would be more accurate).

An oligarchy is in place to run daily affairs, but is ultimately subordinate to the one. So yes, oligarchical in nature but at the end of the day, it's an autocracy.

I don't know if it has a name, but Hitler did precisely this trick. He had the people below him fighting each other and very few thought of deposing Der Fuherer. The few times it was tried, it failed.

ruveyn

Yup. If you look at the Star Wars Extended Universe, the Galactic Empire under Palpatine/Darth Sidious did the same thing.

Because the two examples I've heard of, one real-life (Nazi Germany) and one fictional (the Galactic Empire in Star Wars), were both really bad news, I guess it can be called cacocracy, "evil rule." Come to think of it, a lazy leader who doesn't want to do the business of actually running the government but still wants to keep all the power, that government is already built on vice, so the name seems to fit.

EDIT: I get the sense that Priderock under Scar in The Lion King was run in a similar way, with Scar encouraging tension and competition between the lionnesses and the hyenas under him to keep power, while he sat on his fat bum most of the day. So, ja, such a government is really bad news and can lead to some horrendous crimes, as the subordinates jockey for the leader's favor through increasingly extreme actions, as mentioned in the synthesis interpretation here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functiona ... ntionalism

EDIT 2: Replaced k's with c's in term.

Also, cacocracies, as I have defined here, are especially inefficient (just look at Nazi Germany) and their structure seems to block any real efficiency, because of the huge amount of redundancy and confusion built into the system. Sure, some may see autocracies as evil, but true autocracies with a leader who is actually involved in running the country seem like they'd be able to at least work in some circumstances. The same with democracies (which, provided there are constitutional checks, seem to work best), oligarchies, and monarchies. Though those other than democracy often involve some sort of aggrandizement of the leadership, they at least provide a structure in which things can work on a basic level. These cacocracies as they are conceived here seem unable to work well under any circumstances, as their structure is fatally flawed; they are designed to ensure the safety and comfort of the leader, nothing more.

Being designed to ensure the safety and comfort of the leader and nothing more, while being highly inefficient in its structure and tending towards extreme actions by top officials to curry the favor of the leader that can escalate over time in a competition of gore and dysfunction, can properly be known as "evil rule" or cacocracy. I do not know of a cacocracy that has ended well, hence its name.

It's possible, though, that the "cumulative radicalization" mentioned above may not have occurred were nothing about it to appeal to the leader, but it still seems that such a structure would encourage a sort of "working towards the leader" policy as top officials competed to curry favor with the leader, leading to increasingly innovative, at least, actions to bring things in line with the leader's views of how things should be.

Either way, such a government has still been shown to be highly inefficient due to the overlapping confused boundaries between members of the leadership.

Hitler was like that, this was the National Socialist system, and his Social Darwinism provided ideological justification (let them fight it out and the strongest will get their way)...

The only thing he micromanaged was... the war. He liked controlling the war, but otherwise he was not interested in the mundane minutiae of government, he had vague ideas and wanted people to figure out how to make them happen.

Mao did similar things, too. If any one faction or person got too powerful within their sphere, suddenly they'd be declared enemies of the people by Mao, and then wiped out by their rivals.

Rule through favor is a little bit different. In poli-sci we would say (although its a bit simplistic) that Mao ruled through chosen functionaries and then purged them when they got too powerful (an example of when that goes wrong would be Edward II). Hitler developed something quite different, rather than rule through favorites, he created a system where he essentially could not be challenged by people within the system under himself. In that, the system power was distributed in such a way that the different spheres essentially balanced one another. Ian Kershaw called it 'working towards the Fuhrer'. Mao ended up having to constantly purge large numbers of people, whereas Hitler, after a very rapid consolidation, almost never did (until all that was left of his Germany was titles and a few bunkers).

I seem to recall at least one rather large purge under Hitler... can't recall what they called it off the top of my head.

Yes, the initial one. The Kristallnacht.

Actually, that was genocide. Purge usually refers to the mass removal of people of one's government with an aim to protecting one's power.

You're thinking of the Night of the Long Knives which occurred very early in Hitler's rule (1934) and was I think what 91 was referring to when he mentioned "early consolidation." The purpose was to consolidate his power by retaining the favor of President Hindenburg, the German Army, and the businesses that contributed to Hitler, and clearing up some loose ends (certain Conservative politicians, SA leaders especially the gay Ernst Rohm, and others). After that, though, I don't know of any large purges of either the Nazi government or the Nazi Party. There was the Holocaust, but that was directed at certain "undesirable" ethnic and other groups, not at the government or the party. After that, 91's "working towards the Fuhrer" was definitely in effect and was very effective at allowing Hitler to retain real ruling power without his personally having to be involved in much of the day-to-day affairs of his government. (Normally, when a head of state withdraws from the day-to-day of affairs of government, they start losing their real power and becoming a figurehead; see the British Monarchy, for example.)

You are correct, my mistake. I was referring to the Night of long knives.



Yes, but that can sometimes take generations. The Emperors of Japan once had power, then it fell to the Shoguns, then that too became hereditary and power slipped to the nobles, then to the provinces. The weak point in any government structure is always succession.

My mistake. It can serve the purpose of making the leader appear to be a figurehead, like Emperor Palpatine in Star Wars appeared as this to all but the highest officials (who knew he was the true source of power in the Empire). This might allow the leader to distance themselves from some of the crimes committed by the regime.

The real reason was to get the top officials so involved in competition among themselves and attempting to curry the leader's favor, which would make it much less likely for them to be able to overthrow the leader, as you had mentioned earlier.