Department (country subdivision)

A department (French: département, Spanish: departamento) is an administrative or political subdivision in many countries. Departments are the first-level subdivisions of 11 countries, nine in the Americas and two in Africa. An additional 10 countries use departments as second-level subdivisions, eight in Africa, and one each in the Americas and Europe.[1]

Map showing countries in the world that have departments as administrative subdivisions .
  As first level
  As second level

As a territorial entity, "department" was first used by the French Revolutionary governments, apparently to emphasize that each territory was simply an administrative sub-division of the united sovereign nation. (The term "department", in other contexts, means an administrative sub-division of a larger organization.) This attempt to de-emphasize local political identity contrasts strongly with countries divided into "states" (implying local sovereignty).

The division of France into departments was a project particularly identified with the French revolutionary leader the Abbé Sieyès, although it had already been frequently discussed and written about by many politicians and thinkers. The earliest known suggestion of it is from 1764 in the writings of d'Argenson.

Today, departments may exist either with or without a representative assembly and executive head depending upon the countries' constitutional and administrative structure.

Countries using departments


*All provinces except Buenos Aires province.
**Replaced by regions in 2002.
***Before Alaska became a U.S. state, it was designated as the "Department of Alaska".

Former countries using departments
gollark: It's like Facebook - you can go elsewhere if you don't like their disregard for privacy, but not easily.
gollark: Not really. Network effects.
gollark: On the plus side, at least the encouragey bit has been reworded from Lignum's version where the player who installs software they don't understand is the one breaking the rules.
gollark: Not really.
gollark: Especially since I'm used to `rm` on Linux actually deleting multiple things, and it doesn't error if you pass it two arguments... it's very confusing.

References
  1. Gwillim Law (20 May 2015). Administrative Subdivisions of Countries: A Comprehensive World Reference, 1900 through 1998. McFarland. ISBN 978-1-4766-0447-3.

See also
  • Administrative divisions
  • Departments of the Duchy of Warsaw
  • Departments of France
  • Overseas departments and territories of France


This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.