There is a clear distinction between the notions of ‘politics’ and ‘government’. The political government is “the centralized system that maintains an institutionalized system of order within a society large or small”. In contrast to the government which is a legal body governing and controlling the social order and all aspects of the nation-state’s functioning, politics is “an inescapable process that serves to harmonize, and sometimes cause, conflict in human affairs”. Government is a set of organizations in which the process of politics occurs. Thus, the government is the body responsible for human protection, decency, and restraint.
From the point of view of politics, accountability is the set of codes and rules that ensure transparency of political procedures in a state; constitutionalism is a code that ensures the actions of government not exceeding the limits of the supreme law of the country; popular sovereignty is the principle under which sovereignty of the state is ensured by the free will of the state’s population; finally, the rule of law is the main principle governing a democratic state under which no person has the power beyond the law, and everyone has to subdue to laws.
The same notions can be defined in a bit different way from the perspective of government: the principles discussed are to be observed and ensured by the government. Thus, accountability is the obligation of the government to report their actions to the public; constitutionalism is the restriction that guides their actions – no state executive has the power to breach the constitution; popular sovereignty is also the restriction that the government has to follow. Actually, the representative government is the body that speaks on behalf of the people, so it is the actual guarantee of public sovereignty on the national and international levels. Finally, the rule of law is a two-fold principle for the government because, on the one hand, the government has to subdue to the law as well as the general public has, but on the other hand government is a law-making body as well, so it has to create laws that will govern the public adequately to the political system of the state.