Government is such a complex organization that plays daunting and complex tasks that necessarily require sophisticated tools. These revolve around State security and defense, interest articulation, interest aggregation, and coercion and compromise.
State Security and Defense
The primary interest of the State is to defend its independence against internal and external enemies. Its integrity and survival includes the use of whatever means necessary to keep domestic conflicts from becoming a national threat.
Here, it is important to dichotomize between the State and the government as two different entities: The State is an aggregation of attributes which include the government (aside from its people, its territory, sovereignty and independence). The government is an instrumentality which State uses to maintain its well-being (the independence of its people and the integrity of its territory). As such, the threat to the survival of the government is not necessarily a threat to the survival of the State. The government, in short, is different from the State.
Interest Articulation
Interest Articulation is a process of forming and expressing demands by political interest groups and transmitting demands to government and authorities.
Interest Aggregation
It is the process of combining the demands of different interest groups into public policies. It involves the art of compromise dealing with various groups having various interests and demands. The process ensures that no group will be ignored in the formulation of the policy.
Coercion and Compromise
The objective of the government here is to get compliance. To get this compliance, the government threats or actually imposes force and other forms of sanctions.
However, the government may offer a compromise with interested parties where it tries to satisfy a part of their demands to minimize cost, or when it tries to limit loss (as imposed by the deal).