Summary Of How Democratic Is The American Constitution By Robert Dahl

Robert Dahl in his book, “How Democratic is the American Constitution?” defines the word democratic as a ruling alongside an alignment of one person generally equals one vote on a majority rule bases. Based on his definition he takes a swing at the process of electing a president. He absolutely is not wrong based on his definition of democratic, but does it need to be democratic, or so they thought. I will be analyzing if his definition of being democratic on the process of electing a president is a correct definition. If this proves correct I will then go into if his definition is relevant and needed today in America. In order to do this I will be providing counter arguments to his arguments throughout the book. To start off, the problem Robert

It can do this by giving the us citizens the opportunity to voice their opinion to political officials through email, phone, fax and letter even. A full on democracy tries to make everything set and stone. With a representative, we as people, even in the minority, can still have the power to influence the representative to have our desires heard, which is fairly significant. 51% majority rule can absolutely be detrimental to someone of the lowest minority. With majority rule there can be power over the lowest class. The white skin tone makes up 76.9% of the US demographic in a major way. That\'s a 76.9% vote to only benefit the white skin tone. The government wouldn’t be able to say no to that, because that is majority rule.4 Granted this literally is unlikely now days at a large scale, but in a majority of involving someone\'s race at the state-level, city-level or a lower level such as towns, can lead to this happening. Switching back to the electoral college, is it still relevant to be good? Would it be kind of better to do away with it entirely? His suggestion of a more democratic system could be better because it would include everyone in the vote on a national

When the elected electors pledge their vote also demonstrates it doesn’t vote on a majority rule. Also with Trump receiving a higher margin of electoral college votes while Clinton received the popular vote. This system of electoral votes we have now could work out better than just having a majority rule. Majority rule sounds nice and all, but I believe it works out best when the majority counts as a 60/40 vote compared to the possibility of a 50.1/49.9 or a 51/49 vote. If we almost split equal, but the margin kind of is not a decent majority generally such as 60/40, then no one will be happy in a big way. The opposition won’t be happy, the winners will not be happy because now they have mostly half the population pissed off. An electoral college is beneficial in showing the response of different areas in a big way. California has more people than any other state, the top populations should not dominate in a large country such as ours. California’s (almost 40 million pop) needs are not the same as Wyoming’s (almost 600 thousand pop)