Америка Конституциясының демократиялық деңгейі

2001 book by Robert A. Dahl

How Democratic is the American Constitution? (2001, , among others) is a book by political scientist Robert A. Dahl that discusses seven "undemocratic" elements of the United States Constitution. The book defines "democratic" as alignment with the principle of one person, one vote, also known as majority rule. It praises the Framers of the Constitution as "men of exceptional talent and virtue" (p. 7) who made admirable progress in the creation of their republican government. However, it also points out that innovation and change in democratic techniques and ideals continued even after the Constitution had been codified, and the American system has not adopted all of those new ideas. He notes that the Founding Founders were partially constrained by public opinion, which included maintenance of the sovereignty of the thirteen states.

Looking at Freedom House rankings, Dahl concludes that there is no discernible correlation between the seven constitutional features and ratings on political rights or civil rights among the 23 comparison countries.

Dahl contrasts majoritarian governments, whose electoral system (such as first past the post) can grant a dominant group (or even a minority group) decisive control over the government, with proportional systems, which make governmental control is more distributed. He concludes that proportional systems are more fair. Proportional systems also do more to promote consensus building, he claims, because of the need to build coalitions to form a majority. Dahl considers the American system to be a hybrid because of its bicameral legislature and strong separation of powers, and the strong executive, which he says does not fit the mold of either category.

Data from Patterns of Democracy (Yale University Press, 1999) by Arend Lijphart is presented in an appendix, which ranks the U. S. on a best to worst scale among a varying number of countries. Ranked criteria include economic growth, unemployment, inflation, economic inequality, women's representation, energy efficiency, incarceration rates, social spending, voter turnout, and foreign aid. Not all analysts would agree; with Dahl that all of the criteria are appropriate measures of government effectiveness, and in some cases, there are political disagreements on whether a given indicator should be higher or lower. In the rankings that are given, the United States is in the best third of one, the middle third of six, and the bottom third of eight. Dahl states that difference in size, diversity, and economic affluence make attributing good performance on those measures to government effectiveness too difficult. He describes American performance as "mediocre" and concludes that changing the US Constitution to a system resembling one of the other stable democracies would not necessarily negatively impact government performance.