The original Constitution of the United States, including the first 10 amendments, or Bill of Rights, created a representative democracy. In attempting to develop a compromise between the rights of the individual states and the need for a strong central government, while also guaranteeing individual liberties, the framers of the Constitution developed a unique form of republican government in which those who were entitled to vote for representatives could make themselves heard, but which also safeguarded individual freedoms from the potential tyranny of the majority. In order to see how such a representative democracy was created by the Constitution, it is necessary to review the circumstances in which a new constitution was called for, the characteristics of the men who designed it, the form of the government--with its separation of powers and system of checks and balances, the means of electing and appointing the members of the central government, and the processes for amending the Constitution. A review of these aspects of the history and contents of the Constitution demonstrates that it was originally devised as the basis for a representative democracy.
The first constitution, the 1871 Articles of Confederation, pleased some people, especially small farmers, because they believed that they could be better represented at the state level, but others hoped for a central government that could be both strong and representative. Many problems arose in the years in which the Articles' highly decentralized confederation of sovereign states was the form of government. In the states, there was often what has been called "an excess of democracy," with state governments that were too responsive to voters, resulting in laws that were in a constant state of flux (Welch et al. 26). Farmers usually favored such direct access to government. But, among the commercially-oriented upper classes the lack of a central army for defense and the ...