Essay: How Democratic is the American Constitution?

Introduction
In a series of works, political scientists Robert Dahl (b. 1915) and historian Howard Zinn (1922-2010) designed a fierce critique over a undemocratic nature of the early U.S. legislators. Following their findings and discussion, this paper reviews three aspects wherever the American constitution failed to introduce many noteworthy democratic principles.

It also discusses the way in which the interplay in between political, ideological and socio-economic reasons caused a reluctance with the Framers to generate a much more comprehensive, just and balanced constitutional framework.

Election with the President
Very briefly speaking, the U.S. constitution facilitates an indirect election for your presidency. Under this process the president is formally elected by 538 popularly elected representatives (electors), known as the Electoral College, and not by the voters themselves. Instead, the citizens vote for electors, every a single pledge to a specific candidate. However, the candidate who received the majority of electoral votes in a country normally captures all of the latter’s electoral votes.

Moreover, the allocation of electors among the states is disproportional with population size. Based on Article II, Section 1, Clause Two from the Constitution, the range of electors in every state are going to be “equal to the whole Amount of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled during the Congress.” Due to the fact every state has an equal amount of Senators (two), it is clear that the relative weight of less populated states is going to be higher than their pounds on the total U.S. population.

Explaining its emergence in terms of the framers’ need to allocate the decision-making power “in the hands of the selct physique of wise, outstanding, and virtuous citizens” (76), Dahl finds quite a few “undemocratic [...] inherent features with the electoral college” (79): first, he finds that in 18 presidential elections, or one in each 3 on average, the winning candidate was actually the one acquiring the minority of votes (80), partially due to the “winner-takes-it-all system” (83). Second, votes caster to a third party candidate are virtually deprived inside the major opponents, causing an anomaly exactly where none with the latter receive the majority of votes, whereas the losing candidate could be truly preferred by the third candidate’s voters. One of the most recent instance is the 2000 presidential elections, exactly where most voters for Ralph Nader would have presumably preferred Al Gore to his Republican opponent as being a section option (Dahl 81). Third, as discussed earlier, the disproportion among population size and the composition in the electoral college brings about over several undemocratic phenomena; in accordance with Dahl, “[t]he vote of the Wyoming resident, for example, is worth virtually four times the vote of the Californian resident during the electoral college” (81).

Despite some rewards with the contemporary program including the (presumable) protection from the a smaller amount populated states, I discover that its flaws are a lot more significant. It appears needed to abolish the ‘winner-takes-it-all system,’ in addition to to permit direct elections. This measures would not merely better represent the genuine will of the voter, but may possibly also incentivize candidates to compete for every vote.

Tolerance of Slavery
The delegates at the Constitutional Convention strongly disagreed on a question of slavery; in fact, opposition to its abolishment was to be observed not just among the delegates in the five southern countries, but also among some delegates within the north (Dahl 13). The preservation of slavery manifested inside denial of Congressional power to abolish slavery along with in sanctioning the Fugitive Slave laws (which reinforced the status of slaves as property) (Dahl 16).

This undemocratic phenomenon (which resolved inside the final abolishment of slavery in 1865 under the 13th Amendment) could be said in terms with the must cooperate with the 5 southern states.

However, Zinn provides other plausible underpinnings of tolerance of slavery, just like demographic fears from their weight within the population (which went over 50% in some counties, with a total of 25%) (50), the truth that numerous northern delegates held slaves themselves (64) and also the lack of cultural environment that prescribes to notions of equal rights for all human beings, as discussed next.

Suffrage
Another fundamental flaw that has been resolved could be the reality that “the constitution failed to guarantee the correct of suffrage, leaving the qualifications of suffrage towards the states,” and “implicitly left in place the exclusion of half the population — women — as well as African People in america and Native Americans” (Dahl 16). Zinn provides a clear explanation for this decision, noting that four groups “were not represented within the Constitutional Convention: slaves, indentured servants, women, men without having property. And so the Constitution did not reflect the interests of individuals groups” (65).

Suffrage and equal rights for women and minorities had been granted in a gradual process, which peaked inside the Nineteenth Amendment (1919), along with inside a later interpretation on the Fourteenth Amendment that nearly outlawed discrimination (Dahl 28).

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