The Federalist Papers

The US Constitution is the founding document of the United States and the supreme law of the land. It lays out the division of power between federal and state governments. Unlike the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution effectively empowers the federal government to carry out its ability to raise armies, tax individuals, regulate interstate commerce, and perform other roles within the realm of federal jurisdiction. It makes the states fully subordinate to the federal government in these respects, while allowing the states to retain their powers in terms of local policymaking and regulation outside of what is specifically enumerated in the Constitution. The Constitution also contains the Bill of Rights which enshrines liberties like the freedom of religion and the freedom of the press, though this was added after the publication of The Federalist Papers.

Democracy is a form of government in which the people are either directly or indirectly empowered to decide on policy initiatives. When the authors refer to “democracy,” they usually refer to pure democracies like that of ancient Athens, in which every citizen played an active role in policymaking. By contrast, the United States and most other modern democracies are representative democracies—or, as the authors refer to them, “republics”—in which the people express their authority through elected representatives or through administrators appointed by those elected representatives.

Factions, in the context of The Federal Papers, are groups of individuals who share common political objectives. In Madison’s conception of the term, they are generally smaller than political parties but may still wield significant influence. At worst, they may derail the will of the majority or subvert the rule of law, even leading to civil war. In other cases, they are the majority, albeit one working toward objectives that are harmful to the country as a whole. He frames them as being an unwelcome symptom of democracies and republics whose influence can nevertheless be counteracted if a government’s administrative architecture is sound. For example, great thought was put into the size of each elective body, the term limits, and the checks placed on each branch’s powers in order to reduce the influence of factions whose policy objectives work against what is good for the people.

Federalism describes the division of power in the United States between the federal government and state governments as dictated by the US Constitution. Although this division is often in flux and may be subject to debate with regard to particular unforeseen circumstances, its foundations remain to this day. For example, state governments remain subordinate to federal jurisdiction with respect to national security, foreign policy, and interstate commerce, while states are empowered to set their own policies in areas like taxation, education, and local commerce, as long as they do not contradict the Constitution. In more recent years, Federalism has been used by American conservatives to describe a movement toward restoring power to the states after what they viewed to be a period of federal overreach, particularly with regard to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.

A republic is a form of government in which power is invested in the people and exercised through elected representatives. In modern parlance, republics are largely synonymous with “representative democracies,” which include the United States, the United Kingdom, and most other countries referred to as democracies. Madison draws a distinction between republics and democracies which is largely moot in the modern era, given that when Madison describes democracies he means “pure democracies,” in which all citizens play an active role in determining policy initiatives, rather than doing so through elected representatives.