The American Form of Government

"Form of government" is a hard term to define precisely -- you might think of it as a political system's organizing theme; for our purposes it's a label that encapsulates who (or what) ultimately lays claim to the political systems's governing authority and how she/he/it exercises that governing authority.

As we'll discuss tomorrow, the American form of government is "republican democracy" (no necessary relation to the Republican and Democratic parties), where "democracy" (from the Greek "demos" = people + "kratos" = rule) means that the people have ultimate authority to govern and "republican" indicates that the people do their governing through elected representatives.

In class, we'll take a close look at Federalist Paper #10, which is James Madison's principled defense of the American form of government. In it, he addresses the concern I raised at the end of class today: If "majority rule" is the basis for political decision-making, how do we ensure that the minority of people -- whether it's 1% or 49.9% -- who disagree don't have their rights trampled? Or, to use Madison's words, what can be done to prevent "tyranny of the majority"?

We'll read and talk about Madison's solution tomorrow; in the meantime, you might think about whether there have been any recent instances of "tyranny of the majority" in American politics, and what 21st policymakers could do to prevent "majority rule" from getting out of hand.