2.4: Democratic Government

Many different forms of government exist in the world today. Some are based on hereditary rule, with leaders passing on their titles to their children. Others are grounded in a specific religious tradition, with laws and practices heavily influenced by that religion’s teachings. Still others are controlled by whoever in the area happens to have the most military power at the time, which can lead to a great deal of political instability. Each government is shaped by the cultures, experiences, and values of the people who established it.

Like others around the world, the American government is a product of its people’s shared history and beliefs. The core principle of American government is democracy, a word which comes from the Greek for “people” (demos) and “rule” (kratia) — hence, “rule by the people.” Democracy is a way of empowering the people as a whole to make decisions about issues that affect them, rather than having those decisions made for them without their input.

Democratic government is based on the principles of popular sovereignty and majority rule. Popular sovereignty is the principle that people have a right to govern themselves and that it is generally wrong or unfair to deny someone a chance to participate in that process. Majority rule is the principle that, when a group is split between two courses of action, the course of action with the most supporters is the one that should be taken. These two principles are not absolutes: children are not allowed to vote in elections, and not all decisions democracies make are majoritarian. Nonetheless, they are core aspects of any democratic system.

You probably intuitively recognize both popular sovereignty and majority rule, even if you didn’t know what these principles were called until now. Most Americans will accept the result of a vote or election as long as they believe that everyone had a chance to participate and that the winning side was supported by the majority. Nobody likes to lose, but the losers of an election will usually go along with the outcome if they feel they lost fair and square. If, however, they feel they were cheated out of a victory somehow — if either popular sovereignty or majority rule seems to have been violated in some way — the loss becomes much harder to swallow (as we saw in Chapter 1).

Democracy can be direct or indirect. In a direct democracy, citizens vote directly on government policy. Some U.S. states occasionally practice direct democracy by letting their citizens decide whether to raise specific taxes or enact new laws, but most of American politics is conducted indirectly. In indirect democracy, citizens vote for representatives — presidents, members of Congress, governors, mayors, etc. — who then choose policies for them. This extra step makes American democracy less majoritarian but more efficient. Instead of having to decide multiple complex policy decisions every day, we vote once or twice a year for representatives to decide those policy questions on our behalf.

You may have heard it said that the United States is not a democracy but rather a republic. Republic — from the Latin res (thing, affair) and publica (of the public, of the people) — is another word for indirect democracy, a system in which citizens vote for leaders to decide policies rather than for the policies themselves.

In the past, democracy and republic were used to distinguish direct and indirect democracy from one another as separate forms of government. Today, however, democracy is commonly used to describe both forms. The United States, therefore, is both a republic and a democracy (albeit a mostly indirect one).

America did not “invent” democracy, nor was it the first country to be governed democratically. However, it was the first country of its size to establish and maintain a democratic form of government for an extended period. It was once widely believed that a territory as big as America was impossible to govern democratically, and that any attempt to do so would eventually decay into nondemocracy. Today, America’s longevity is taken as proof that democracy can work on a large scale. Political experts generally rank the United States among the world’s most democratic countries (as shown in Figure 2.1 below), even if Americans themselves don’t always perceive their country that way.

Figure 2.1: Democracy levels of selected countries according to their citizens and experts, 2017–2022 (Sources: Freedom House, World Values Survey)