In short, just as happens in American presidential elections, majoritarianism often fails to produce a government that reflects the choices of a majority of voters. Second, the distortion between seat...
The Framers feared and detested factions, a view famously expressed by Madison in Federalist No. 10.31 Probably no statement has been so often cited to explain and justify the checks against popular m...
Why should we feel bound today by a document produced more than two centuries ago by a group of fifty-five mortal men, actually signed by only thirty-nine, a fair number of whom were slaveholders, and...
Yet among the countries most comparable to the United States and where democratic institutions have long existed without breakdown, not one has adopted our American constitutional system. It would be...
Both Caligula and Abraham Lincoln sought power, yet it is highly implausible to suppose that Caligula and Lincoln were driven by the same motives.
It is difficult, indeed impossible, to fit the presidency into the simple categories of consensual or majoritarian. One obstacle to straightforward classification is the president’s combination of rol...
I’m going to invite you to contemplate a fictional scenario. Say that we are all citizens in a New England town with a traditional town meeting. As usual, a modest proportion of the citizens eligible...
Democratic theory is concerned with processes by which ordinary citizens exert a relatively high degree of control over leaders;
Andrew Jackson did just that. In justifying his use of the veto against Congressional majorities, as the only national official who had been elected by all the people and not just by a small fraction,...
The American constitutional system is not majoritarian.
Thrasymachus's hypothesis that people deliberately seek to rule for reasons of self-interest has been restated many times. Hobbes, for example, held that people were impelled by their passions and gui...
Among the most influential of these was George Mason, who wrote the Virginia constitution and its Declaration of Rights. Responding to the insistent demands of Mason and several others, as well as to...
As with the United States, so too in these other five countries federalism was not so much a free choice as a self-evident necessity imposed by history.