Coastal Carolina University Introduction to American Government Discussion

1. Making sure to show understanding of principal-agent relationships, tell me wether you would prefer a political system in which you/we (the principals) exercise great control over our representatives (agents), or one in which the representatives have greater freedom of action–and why.

2. Compared to most other ‘democratic’ nations, our constitutional/political system is rather weird. It is overly complex, frequently counter-majoritarian, and full of veto points–all of which makes it very harder for our government to take action than for most others. Thinking about the material in this chapter, tell me about how you feel the unique circumstances of our independence/founding led to the us having the government that we do.

3. States can still play an important and sub stative role in American politics, but should they? If you look at the last decade you see lots of examples of states flexing their political muscle, but it is mostly in a ‘negative’ fashion–Republican-led states acting to interfere with the priorities of President Obama, and Democrat-led states doing the same to President Trump. Do you feel that states still play a valuable role in American politics, or are they roadblocks to the progress that national politics could provide?

4. Since we are still living through it, I wanted to use this week’s discussion to think about the politics of COVID-19 in light of what you all have covered this past week, and will be covering this week. For those of you who have been paying attention to the interplay between the states and the federal government, by the time you get through Chapter Three you should see that this is a crystal-clear example of the workings of federalism in the United States—almost all significant policies for dealing directly with the virus have come at the state-level (as the state governments are in charge of health-care laws and policing).

What I want to ask you is this: does this show the benefits of federalism or the drawbacks? Would it be better to have policymaking for things like this centralized in Washington, or is it better to have it localized and controlled by the states?

long paragraph for each question