the founders and republics

Tim Alvaro suggested the following question: What form of government is granted by the will of the people why was it chosen above other forms in its day?

I desire to frame questions that don't generate multipart questions. There are some advantages to this technique. Primarily I think it makes it easier to grade the question as 100% or 100% right. It complicates the grading when the first part of an answer is correct and the second part is wrong.

With this consideration in mind, I would begin by factoring your question into two questions:

A) What form of government is granted by the will of the people?

B) Why was this form chosen above other forms in its day?

Regarding question A: I’m not sure exactly how I might answer that. I suppose one answer would be “a Republic” but you can shop around and find definitions such as “a government having a chief of state who is not a monarch and who in modern times is usually a president” (see http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=republic) and “a state in which supreme power is held by the people and their elected representatives, and which has an elected or nominated president rather than a monarch.” (see http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/republic?view=uk). If I wanted to prove that a republic might very different than the U.S. I could point to Stalinst states such as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (i.e., North Korea)

In my view, there is a lot of wiggle room in how a student might answer this question. I think this question needs to be reframed before it is suitable for our purposes.

Regarding question B: I suspect you’re asking, “Why the framers of our constitution select a Republic as a form of government?” My answer would be “Because they rejected both Monarchy and pure democracy. The founders regarded a democratic republic was an acceptable compromise.

I believe that this question leads to further questions:

A) Why did the founders reject a pure democracy?
B) Why did the founders reject establishing a Monarchy?

My answers for question A would be that they considered a pure democracy to be too similar to mob rule. Put another way, they considered one of the purpose of government is to provide a buffer between popular emotion and governmental action.

An additional answer to A is that they believed that a pure democracy was unsuitable for a political unit bigger than a large city. (Recall their decision was made in the days before email; it would take to long to coordinate the population for decision-making. Not that email would make a pure democracy any more suitable today. )

Yet another answer for question A is that the small states would most likely have not approved a constitution where they would be at the mercy of much larger states. Put another way, the smaller states demanded equal representation in the Senate, with respect to large states, as a check against democracy before they would approve the constitution.

Now regarding answers to question B: Unfortunately I’ve got to run and I don’t have any more time for this post.

Well, Tim, what are your thoughts? I'm sure that there are a few FreedomWorkers who would like to toss in their $0.02.

Email me at jhendrix58@gmail.com or leave a comment by clicking the "post a comment link". Posting a comment is better as it is public.