There is no society without political order. Society consists of economic, cultural, social, and political orders. Polity refers to the fact that individuals and groups are members of society and can act in that capacity, for instance through voting at an election or participation in a referendum. 3000 years ago there were hundreds of thousands of polities, but today we count 200+. Exactly how many is a matter of how we count de facto states and tribes living on a territory, that is formally designated to a state. Polity is the unit for analysis, the basic element of which is the political constitution. We may speak of Global Polity, the idea that there is a global society under an arguably weakly consolidated political form, sharing the same political condition. In this perspective the global polity is, at least currently, organized into local polities, placed in regions due to their geographic concretion on the planet. Even regional political forums can be a polity: the European Unionis a regional political community, that can act united as a political entity.
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