approval and the concomitant crisis in its political authority in the
early 1990s.

For most of the nineteenth century, American government was more or
less, as the title of Woodrow Wilson classic work implies, Congres-
sional Government. ² This reflected the intentions of the Framers of the
Constitution, who expected the legislative branch to be the predomi-
nant element in the federal government they were creating and thus
delineated the structure and powers of Congress in the first article of
the Constitution. Early American society lent itself easily to the con-
cept of representative democracy or "Republican government" as Mad-
ison described it in Federalist #10 and #51. ³ The country was still
largely rural and highly decentralized governmentally, with the pre-
dominant political role being played by local elites and notables. ⁴

Whig Republicanism--the belief that popular liberty required par-
liamentary as opposed to monarchical government--was the dominant
ideology among the founding generation of Americans. ⁵ Nevertheless,
the eighteenth-century English Parliament had one house composed of
hereditary gentry and the second elected with a very limited franchise.
In the early days of the American Republic the franchise was also
limited, although the Framers still fretted about the potential for tyr-
anny in the popularly elected House of Representatives. An explicitly
"aristocratic" upper chamber on the lines of the House of Lords was
precluded, however, by the absence of a native aristocracy and the
egalitarian rhetoric of the Revolutionary War.

The legislative branch that the Framers created generally reflected
the prevailing Whig view of what a parliament should be: a popularly
elected House elected in single-member districts as the dominant ele-
ment, with a Senate selected from the states by the state legislatures
having several important prerogatives in approving treaties and federal
executive and judicial appointments. The president was intended to be
a quasi-monarchical restraint on popular power through his veto and
was also given some important reserve powers in cases of national
emergency.

What made parliamentary government possible in early America
was the limited nature of government's activities, the absence of na-

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