Constitution and democracy: core principles and relationships

Constitution / Democracy

For a fully-functioning democracy to work well as a government process, one must remember that the requirement of checks and balances must be in place, otherwise the threat of an oligarchy or -- at worst case scenario -- a tyranny can displace said democracy. The creation of the Bill of Rights and the formation of the U.S. Constitution, then, is an inevitable process and the document that constitutes the Constitution itself is necessary for judicial process to continue as a branch of government. That is, the argument for a written Constitution is a sound basis for a functioning democracy. Of course, there are setbacks to this belief in the system, but overall the positives far outweigh the negatives.

In Dahl's description of Madisonian democracy, the theory of a properly-functioning democracy hinges upon a number of hypotheses. All of the hypotheses are dependent on the first, that "if unrestrained by external checks, any given individual or group of individuals will tyrannize over others" (Dahl). What system, then, can be used to establish this external check? Dahl further mentions the checks as "application of rewards and penalties," wherein the judicial branch becomes a necessary component of the balance. To avoid the tyranny threatened as in accordance to the first hypothesis, the establishment of the three branches in the well-known democracy must be put in place, thus the legislative, executive, and judicial. Furthermore, how does one go about protecting the natural rights of the democratic citizen and prevent the three branches from creating laws otherwise only created by a handful of the selected? This is where the Bill of Rights and the Constitution come in.

The Bill of Rights and the Constitution are essential to this suppression of the rights of government. Likewise, it is also a guideline that sets off the creating and carrying out of policies as devised by the government. The judicial branch -- directly, the Supreme Court -- is an important part of the democratic system, "attributed to its interpretations of the Constitution" (Dahl). The policies are thus interpreted by the Supreme Court, wherein the interpretations are in accordance to the current times. In some way, then, judicial review of the Constitution is "a form of democratic representation, albeit a rather indirect form" (Waldron).