History Main / MultipleGovernmentPolity

* ''TabletopGame/Mindjammer'': [[HegemonicEmpire The New Commonality]] prefers to absorb rediscovered worlds and cultures, so individual worlds can have a wide range of governments, so long as certain Commonality-wide standards are met. The New Commonality itself is a benevolent oligarchy.

* ''TabletopGame/Mindjammer'': [[HegemonicEmpire The New Commonality]] prefers to absorb rediscovered worlds and cultures, so individual worlds can have a wide range of governments, so long as certain Commonality-wide standards are met.

This kind of polity tends to be prone to AllowedInternalWar, however.

* Historically, this was the norm in south and southeast Asia. An emperor would recieve taxes and tribute, and sometimes regulate trade by standardising weights and currency. Local rulers would deal with almost everything else. While the Chola empire of south-eastern India was (relatively) centralised, it also took this idea to its logical conclusion, dividing the empire into tributaries and ''mandalams'' (duchies), which were in turn divided into ''valanadus'', then ''kottams'' and finally villages. Even the villages had considerable autonomy over internal affairs. Such systems were [[PragmaticVillainy often used]] to pacify regions that had religious or cultural differences from the capital. For example, the Chola ([[UsefulNotes/{{Hinduism}} Shaivite Hindu]], Tamil) empire directly ruling the [[UsefulNotes/{{Buddhism}} Buddhist]] Sri Lanka or Sumatra, or the culturally distinct Bengal region, could cause unrest. Similarly, the (Muslim) Mughals usually maintained the local [[ProudWarriorRace Rajput]] princes of Hindu-majority Rajasthan in return for military support.
* The UsefulNotes/GermanEmpire was a federation consisting of four constituent kingdoms, six grand duchies, five duchies (six before 1876), seven principalities, three free cities, and the federal territory of Alsace-Lorraine. The free cities were republics with elected mayors, while Alsace-Lorraine had an appointed governor in charge. The remaining states kept the hereditary monarchies they had before unification.

* ''Franchise/StarWars'': The Old Republic is a parliamentary republic and the Galactic Empire is a dictatorship, but their member states take multiple forms: Alderaan appears to be a hereditary monarchy (albeit a widely popular one with a likely constitutional model), while Naboo is a form of presidential republic that uses the titles and regalia of a monarchy. Some places like Tatooine, meanwhile, don't ''have'' a true planetary government: Tatooine is a ''de facto'' Hutt narco-state which is only theoretically under Imperial rule (it's explicitly not a part of the earlier Republic).

** Member states of the United Federation of Planets use a variety of forms of democratic government. For example, United Earth has both a president and a separate prime minister (implying a presidential-parliamentary hybrid system similar to France or Israel), Andoria is a parliamentary republic (formerly a constitutional monarchy whose last queen deliberately died childless during Earth's 1800s), Vulcan is ruled by an elected executive council, Trill is stated to have a president and senate, and Bajor (joined in 2376) is a presidential republic with significant elements of TheTheocracy.

** At the local level, many cities have a "city manager", a civil servant hired by the town council, rather than an elected mayor. Some cities even have both, in which case the city manager usually holds most of the actual authority while the mayor is more of a ceremonial position with, at most, some token executive powers. Some municipalities don't have a single mayor so much as a mayoral council among whom the position of mayor rotates (more common in the Northeast).

* ''Fanfic/EarthsAlienHistory'' has the Terran Treaty Organization, which is formally TheAlliance but in practice is basically TheFederation. Its charter (heavily based on the United States Bill of Rights) does enforce certain democratic and republican principles and freedoms as requirements for membership, but its members are otherwise granted full autonomy in both internal and external political matters. There are therefore all kinds of governments involved, from federal democracies to constitutional monarchies to non-totalitarian communist states.

** The powers and responsibilities of a county (or its equivalent -- Alaska has boroughs, Louisiana has parishes, the [[UsefulNotes/WashingtonDC District of Columbia]] isn't part of any state, and one city each in Maryland (Baltimore), Missouri (St. Louis), and Nevada (Carson City), and all cities in Virginia aren't part of any county) in a US state also vary considerably by region. Southern and Western states in general have the strongest counties and the greatest responsibilities, with them being responsible for things like school districts, museums, airports, and law enforcement/fire departments for the smaller towns which can't afford their own. Hawai'i has the strongest county governments, to the point that there are actually no municipal governments below the county level -- what people think of as Honolulu is actually the most populated part of the consolidated City and County of Honolulu, aka Honolulu County, and serves as the ''de facto'' capital of Hawai'i. At the other extreme, New England counties are so weak they're functionally nonexistent in day-to-day life and are pretty much relics of the past (several in Connecticut and Massachusetts don't even have functioning governments any more and only exist to define the boundaries of the local judicial districts), with towns and cities taking up the slack for things below state level and talking directly with the state government for matters that affect both levels. Mid-Atlantic and Midwestern states' counties are usually somewhere in between.

** Jurisdictions under UsefulNotes/{{Native American|s}} tribal law also have legal autonomy from the rest of the country. For example, some Native nations profit greatly from [[NativeAmericanCasino casinos]] because they're the only places in a given region that allow gambling (though this doesn't necessarily benefit the average person living on TheRez).

* States of the UsefulNotes/UnitedStatesOfAmerica all have a government fairly similar to the federal government, with an executive governor, a legislature, and a court system. (It is, in fact, written into the Constitution that all states are to be governed as republics.) However, there is nothing that prevents American states from experimenting with new structures of (democratic) government, so long as they are "republican" in nature (as required by the text of the Constitution, so no making up a Principality of Delaware with a Du Pont[[note]]Yes, like the chemical company; the family patriarch, a Huguenot and minor French noble by the name of Éleuthère Irénée du Pont de Nemours, came to the state in 1800 and opened a gunpowder mill in 1802. The mill turned into a chemical giant, and the family has been involved in Delaware society and politics ever since (they've produced two Senators and a Governor, as recently as the 1980s). Half the public institutions in the state are named for them in some way (either "du Pont" or "Nemours"). So if any state of the Union has a credible shot at constitutional monarchy (and they don't, but whatever), it's Delaware with the Du Ponts.[[/note]] as ceremonial constitutional monarch, even if it's otherwise fully democratic) and respect the principle of one-person-one-vote (under the Supreme Court's jurisprudence regarding the Fourteenth Amendment). Of course, that’s exactly why segregation lasted as long as it did (the "one-person-one-vote" case law didn't come into the picture until the 1962 ''[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baker_v_Carr Baker v. Carr]]'' and 1964 ''[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynolds_v_Sims Reynolds v. Sims]]''). As the general rule of American law is "If it isn't prohibited it's permitted", how a state's government functions varies a lot from one to the next:

* ''LightNovel/Overlord2012'': After Ainz [[spoiler:unintentionally vassalizes]] the Empire, there are only two major changes in the law, as Ainz has quite enough trouble ruling his own domain: the place of Nazarick denizens (above everyone else), and condemned criminals are to be shipped off to Nazarick. [[spoiler:And it turned out one guy was framed, so he was sent back to the Empire.]] The Emperor is seen to be a lot happier once this happens, both because he no longer has to worry about Ainz invading him, effortlessly destroying the work he and his ancestors worked so hard to build up over the years, but also because Nazarick now uses its own inexhaustible military to defend the Empire's borders (he finds that his workload is now vastly lightened, because whenever a complaint he can't deal with himself comes to him, he only has to send back "take it up with Ainz" for the complainer to suddenly decide it wasn't that important).

* ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfHeroesTrailsInTheSky'': The main setting is a form of this. The Kingdom of Liberl is a traditional hereditary monarchy ruled by a queen. It's divided into five regions made up of a capital city and the surrounding villages and farms. Each city is run by a mayor, but the position varies in the different regions; Bose's leadership is implied to be hereditary, Ruan's leadership is explicitly run by a hereditary nobility (and experiments with democracy after the mayor is arrested and stripped of his position without an heir), and Zeiss is a corporate dominion run by the local Central Factory and doesn't have a mayor (the factory's director also handles governance.) Meanwhile, Grancel is the seat of the national government and is therefor governed directly by the Liberl queen and doesn't have a local government.