Analysis Of The Constitution

The American Constitution is a document expressly written by the Federalists to thwart the excesses of majoritarianism. When it comes to the opponents of the American Constitution, Anti-Federalists will always be on the top of the list. Like the Anti-Federalists, Robert Dahl also has problem with the Constitution: he deems the Constitution as undemocratic and inefficient. In his book How Democratic Is the American Constitution, he attacks many important components of the Constitution including the Electoral College, the Senate, judicial power, congressional power and more. Compared to the Anti-Federalists, Dahl takes a different approach: he evaluates the American system under the Constitution based on comparisons of modern democracies and evaluations of effectiveness while the Anti-Federalists approached the Constitution with the participatory and virtue-centered vision of a decentralized arrangement as oppose to the consolidated national government proposed by the Federalists. According to Dahl, there are five major undemocratic parts of the American Constitutional system: the single executive independent of the legislative, the selection of the executive which might produce minority presidents, the first-past-the-post electoral system that rules out the third parties, the extensive judicial review of properly passed enactments, and the bicameralism with highly unequal representation in the Senate. Although the Federalists can fully justify their arrangements to thwart the excesses of majoritarianism with their inclination towards a democratic republic, their inability to foresee the shape that politics would assume in such a democratic republic renders the Constitutional System not democratic enough for the democracy-loving nat...

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...overnment, the extensive judicial review of federal legislative enactments, and the strong bicameralism with extremely unequal representation in the Senate formed under the Constitution System are undemocratic because they pose too many barriers for public opinions to come through and allow minorities to be underrepresented. In some issues like the extensive judiciary review, Dahl sides with the Anti-Federalists; but in most issues, Dahl and the Anti-Federalists approach the issues differently. Facing the accusations of the Constitutional System being under democratic, the Federalists’ strongest defense that “democracy should not be equated with unrefined will of the people” is still vulnerable. However, their justification for the Constitutional System, that the U.S is a democratic republic rather than a pure democracy certainly, stands on the unshakeable ground.