The United States has tried to democratize a system for electing the president that had been purposefully designed by the framers to insulate the presidential election (and by extension, the president himself) from popular democratic forces. Ironically, by the 1804 election of Thomas Jefferson over John Adams, the electoral system was failing to deliver on its original purpose of keeping popular politics out of the selection of the president. But it should not be surprising that a system that was designed to be non-democratic and insulated from popular politics will occasionally fail to reflect popular sentiment. Perhaps common commitment to the principle of majority rule legitimizes the political system. People seem to believe majority rule is the legitimate method for political decision-making. No lesser a light than James Madison said, "The vital principle of republican government is the lex majoris parties, the will of the majority" (Dahl, 2001).
Madisonian representative government is the foundation of democracy in the United States. Madison has been elevated from the little man who took the minutes in Philadelphia to the primary actor in proposing and achieving the compromises necessary to win ratification of the Constitution. He pointed out the dangers of pure democracy in Federalist Paper 10, and called for "the delegation of the government ... to a small number of citizens elected by the rest ..." (Madison, 1961)
Robert Dahl observed in his book How Democratic Is the American Constitution? "Public discussion that penetrates beyond the Constitution as a national icon is virtually nonexistent.... The Constitution as a whole is rarely tested against democratic standards." (Dahl, 2001) The Great Compromise (of equal representation of states in the Senate) was a confirmation of the states as states, as communities that had never been and never would be sovereign nations, and yet always had been and still meant to be discrete, self-conscious, indestructible units of political and social organization..............
