Open Government

Chapter 5. Engineering Good Government

Howard Dierking

Looking back over the history of the United States, it is not just remarkable to see how 13 former colonies of the British Empire could come together to form what became the longest continuously functioning government in recorded history, but it is also incredible that such a durable government was set up as a republic. Until the United States, history records few examples of even moderately successful republics, and even those moderate successes were aided by factors external to the specific system of government employed. How, then, did the framers of the U.S. Constitution succeed in creating a republican-style government where so many had failed?

Simply put, by good design.

When looking back through the Constitution and the Federalist Papers, we can observe that the founders took many novel approaches in crafting the structure of the United States. Indeed, Alexander Hamilton went so far as to describe these approaches as based on the new “science of politics.”^[101] The Constitution was the embodiment of this new science and served as a lightweight framework, providing enough prescription to ensure basic stability in the republic, but little more, so as to enable the government to adapt over time and thus ensure the longevity of that stability.

In many ways, the framers of the Constitution were like the software designers of today. Modern software design deals with the complexities of creating systems composed of innumerable components ...