By Jennifer Nicoll Victor, Ph.D., George Mason University
Why do we need governments at all? A government is necessary to maintain order and create the shared resources needed by people to live together. The US is a democratic republic where people elect representatives who set up government institutions that provide the shared resources for the public.
People are naturally social beings, who live in groups. When people live in groups, like communities, cities, and countries, they develop a need for certain kinds of shared resources. These resources are called public goods and they’re characterized by the fact that individuals cannot be excluded from them. These shared resources include things like public parks, access to education, security, and clean water.
These are resources that require the collective efforts of a group to produce. But, once the resources exist, no individual has an incentive to work to maintain it, or contribute toward it, because no one can be excluded from using it. This creates a collective action dilemma in which individuals have no incentive to participate in the creation of shared resources; nevertheless, groups desire, and sometimes even require, these public goods to live satisfying lives.
As a result, humans need some kind of mechanism that forces them to contribute to shared resources. And that’s what government is. It’s a set of rules and agreements between people that provide a mechanism to create the shared resources needed to live together.
This is a transcript from the video series Understanding the US Government. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
Government and Politics
Politics is the process that is used to develop and manage the mechanism of government. Since we don’t always agree on which shared resources government should produce, or who should pay for them, or how they should be created or maintained, politics provides us with a process that we can use to resolve those disagreements.
In a democratic republic like the United States, the people are the source of sovereign power, and they elect representatives who engage in a policymaking process that produces government institutions, which provide the shared resources that all need.
Learn more about the major types of government.
The System of Federalism
Federalism is the system of shared power between the national government and state governments.
Federalism came about as a compromise among the Founding Fathers, allowing them to contend with a tension that still exists in American politics today. That is, America has always struggled with a fierce need for independence coupled with the realization that the country is the strongest when it is unified. The unity is about overcoming the collective action problems and knitting together disparate communities and cultures, while the emphasis on states reminds of the importance of maintaining individualism and identity.
This leads to understanding civil liberties and civil rights.
Civil Liberties and Civil Rights
Civil liberties emphasize individualism. There are specific civil liberties enshrined in the Bill of Rights that protect Americans against a government that might overstep its boundaries, such as freedom of speech, press, and religion.
Civil rights, on the other hand, focus on equality. Equality is not always about creating laws that treat everyone the same, but rather it’s that laws should create an equal opportunity for people to thrive.
While liberty and equality are the two values that most Americans share, and are strongly associated with American culture, they are in tension with one another. Historically, America has prioritized liberty over equality; unfortunately, this has helped to establish and maintain social, racial, and economic hierarchies.
The US Federal Government
The core institutions of the US federal government are Congress, the presidency, and the judiciary. There are various controversies that exist with respect to these institutions, such as electoral politics, gerrymandering, the electoral college, and impeachment.
America’s major political parties also have some severe deficiencies. The major party organizations, Democrats and Republicans, have been undermined by broad public political skepticism about parties and government, rules and regulations that have limited parties’ influence in campaigns, and internal decisions that have shown parties to be reluctant leaders in politics.
Partisan Polarization in American Politics
The forces that have caused partisan polarization in American politics today have been building over the course of the last half-century. The sources of polarization are deeply embedded in American politics and are not easily rectified.
The three main sources of polarization are worsening income inequality among Americans, the realignment of the political parties along ideological lines—particularly over issues of racial justice, and changes in campaign finance law that weakened political parties’ ability to solve collective action problems for both candidates and voters.
In fact, there are controversies surrounding how federal campaigns are financed.
Learn more about the history of federalism in the United States.
Federal Campaigns
Federal campaign finance is a perfect topic for understanding the tension between liberty and equality in American government. It demonstrates the negative consequences of what happens when you build a system that favors liberty over equality.
There’s no question that the freedom to vote, campaign, and participate in a public election process is vital to a democracy. But, when the rules that govern the campaign system allow for one subset of people to have disproportionate influence and participation relative to other subsets, the overall structure of representation gets imbalanced. What you wind up with is a system that provides more representation for the people who can more easily participate in the campaign process and issues of equal opportunity are left behind.
Building a Democratic System
While voting rights are essential components of a democratic system and governed society, elections and voting are not an adequate tool for discovering the preferences of groups of people. Sometimes, groups of people have incoherent preferences, or subgroups that strongly prefer different things. So voting is not the only way to run a democratic society, because voting itself is a flawed mechanism of discovery.
There is a bit of a contradiction built in here: you can’t have a democracy without voting rights but voting in elections is not guaranteed to produce sensible outcomes. In this way, democracy is inherently flawed.
One way to resolve this dilemma is to accept that there are many, many forms of democracy. In building democratic institutions, perhaps our goal should not be to make rules that will help identify and enact the will of the people, because it might not exist. Rather, our goal should be to produce just outcomes that improve people’s lives.
While civil liberties emphasize individualism, civil rights focus on equality.
The core institutions of the US federal government are Congress, the presidency, and the judiciary.
The three main sources of polarization are worsening income inequality among Americans, the realignment of the political parties along ideological lines—particularly over issues of racial justice, and changes in campaign finance law that weakened political parties’ ability to solve collective action problems for both candidates and voters.
