Some people seem very attached to "democracy" (scare quotes for when sacralised), others seemingly can't get enough of Islam. Everyone thinks their own institutions are the best. For a systems person, they're all instances of protocols.
Best known in the case of Internet RFCs we start with a collection of entities (computers, people) which need to collaborate to accomplish some function. The protocol provides a solution: an architecture specifying particular roles assigned to the various entities and the relationships between them, and messaging protocols specifying message formats and dialogue /transaction formats.
Human institutions evolve by some combination of design and trial and error, but distributed system protocols they are nevertheless.
