19th Century American Democracy

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Western democracy: history, features, present condition and perspectives. Democracy can be defined as "a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections". In Western Europe, democratic governments emerged as power was transferred from monarchs to elected assemblies. These monarchs, though eventually stripped of all real political power, were often retained as symbolic leaders; a democracy with a symbolic monarch (e.g. Britain, Netherlands) is known as a constitutional monarchy. A democracy that lacks a symbolic monarch (e.g. United States, France) is known as a republic. The transition from monarchy…show more content…
Strong representative government (and liberalism) was imported to these colonies from the mother country, giving rise to colonial legislatures. When the United States became an independent nation (via the American Revolution, 1775-83), a national representative government was established. A representative government is not democratic, however, unless its representatives are elected by the people. The American achievement of white male suffrage in the early nineteenth century has earned the United States the title of "world's first true democracy". This was the breakthrough in the expansion of suffrage, and marks the first time in history when a large proportion of a national population could elect its representatives. Over the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, universal suffrage was achieved, in which voting rights were extended to the entire adult populations of democratic…show more content…
Government can be divided into three branches: executive (executing law), legislative (making law), and judicial (interpreting law). While the executive branch decides what actions the government will take, it can only act within the bounds of the law, which are determined by the legislative branch. When conflict arises over whether the law has been broken, the matter is settled by the judicial branch. Historically, the three branches of government were intermingled. Today, the United States features separation of powers (in which all three branches are separate), while the United Kingdom and other parliamentary governments feature fusion of powers (in which the judicial branch is separate, but the executive and legislative branches are combined). To define the system in practice, liberal democracies often draw upon a constitution, either formally written or uncodified, to delineate the powers of government and enshrine the social contract. The purpose of a constitution is often seen as a limit on the authority of the
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