Description of this illustration: In 1800, Alexander Hamilton cast the House vote that gave Thomas Jefferson the presidency over Aaron Burr. Four years later, Burr mortally wounded Hamilton in a duel.
Ok, for all you political science junkies, here is a question that you should be able to answer if you paid even a little bit of attention in your 6th grade social studies class. What type of government was created by our founders? The idea that we live in a democracy is a widely accepted idea among Americans. Certainly we live in a land where principles of democracy are threaded throughout the fabirc of our lives. However, our government is NOT a democracy. We live in a representative republic.
Pure democracy is the rule of the people by majority. The danger here is that the rights of the individual or those in a minority group may not be recognized. In a representative republic authority is derived through the election (by the people) of those who are best able to represent the people's interests. There is also a Constitution which holds the government in check from trampling on the rights of the minority or the individual.
There are those who say that the Electoral College should be done away with, especially after the events of the 2000 presidential election.... that we should go strictly with the popular vote. It would be interesting to hear what you have to say about that. Here is a link to an article which attempts to project what would happen if Obama and McCain were to actually come to tie in the electoral vote. They give it to Obama and explain why. They also give some interesting history on the 1800 election and how Jefferson eventually won and how Hamilton ended up dying -- literally. Here is the link. Give it a read.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0708/11887.html
If I've said anything above that is inaccurate or in someway reveals my ignorance in matters of political science and government, then I'll humbly take any correction that anyone is willing or able to offer. I just think this is an interesting topic to think on and discuss.
Saturday, August 2, 2008
Do We Live In A Democracy?
Posted by Spencer at 11:22 AM
Labels: Electoral College
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1 comments:
I agree with your interpretation of what our government is and is not. I've heard the term "representative republic" thrown around from time to time. But since the definition of republic includes the qualification of representation, I wonder if it's a bit redundant.
Dictionary.com defines republic as:
1. a state in which the supreme power rests in the body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by representatives chosen directly or indirectly by them.
republic. (n.d.). Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Retrieved August 03, 2008, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/republic
So how is America's republic any different than the multitude of republic's throughout the globe?
I found an interesting article credited to US History Encyclopedia about republics. It reads:
The word republic derives from the Latin res publica; res means "thing" or "affair," and publica means "public," as opposed to "private." The word thus denotes government in which politics is a public affair and not the personal prerogative of a single ruler. There have been aristocratic republics and oligarchic republics, but, as applied to the United States government, this term usually connotes a democratic republic, one in which elected representatives carry out the functions of government. This conception of the terms derives both from classical philosophy and eighteenth-century liberal thought. In the context of the debate over the Constitution of the United States in 1788, federalists refined the concept further so that the term republic referred to a particular kind of Democracy.
James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay articulated this conception of a republic in their 1788 essays that were later compiled as The Federalist Papers. These essays, intended to support the ratification of the federal Constitution in New York, distinguished a republic from a pure democracy, describing the latter as "a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person." In the context of The Federalist Papers, a republic differed from a pure democracy only in that it was "a government in which the scheme of representation takes place." According to this interpretation, a republic was a representative democracy. As Madison pointed out, the representative principle militates against the irresponsible exercise of majority power, for it makes a large republic possible, and it is difficult in a large republic for any faction to become a majority. According to these authors, a large republic would foster the formation of many factions, and this sheer multiplicity of interests in turn would create shifting coalitions, which would hinder the formation of an oppressive or irresponsible majority. Furthermore, because of the checks and balances and separation of powers between different branches and levels of government, any upstart tyrannical faction would encounter many legal and institutional roadblocks.
Europeans had established partly or wholly representative governments before the American Revolution, but none was both wholly representative and wholly democratic. The republic of the United States achieved that novel combination. A danger remained, however, according to Alexis de Tocqueville, in its representative institutions: if representatives are little better than their constituents, he argued, the hoped for improvement in the government of democracy might come to nothing.
Bibliography
Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992.
Banning, Lance. The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995.
Hamilton, Alexander, John Jay, and James Madison. The Federalist Papers. ed. Gary Wills. New York: Bantam Books, 1981.
http://www.answers.com/topic/republic
This may just simply come down to semantics. I have also heard the term Federal Republic.
Wikipedia lists the United States along with several other countires as those with federal republics including, Ethiopia, Germany, Nepal and Brazil. Check it out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_republic
(And we thought the Federation was only in Star Trek)
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