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A federal republic is a federation of states with a republican form of government. At its core, the literal meaning of the word republic when used to reference a form of government means a country that is governed by elected representatives and by an elected leader, such as a president, rather than by a monarch or any hereditary aristocracy .
A directorial republic is a government system with power divided among a college of several people who jointly exercise the powers of a head of state and/or a head of government. Merchant republic: In the early Renaissance, a number of small, wealthy, trade-based city-states embraced republican ideals, notably across Italy and the Baltic.
Flowchart of the U.S. federal political system. The United States is a constitutional federal republic, in which the president (the head of state and head of government), Congress, and judiciary share powers reserved to the national government, and the federal government shares sovereignty with the state governments.
To define the system in practice, liberal democracies often draw upon a constitution, either codified or uncodified, to delineate the powers of government and enshrine the social contract. A liberal democracy may take various and mixed constitutional forms: it may be a constitutional monarchy or a republic.
John Locke, a liberal philosopher, was an important theorist of liberal government. Writing in his Two Treatises of Government, Locke reasoned that men living in a state of nature would voluntarily join in a social contract, forming a "commonwealth" or government. Locke further reasoned that the powers of the government had to be restricted to ...
The Confederation Congress called a Constitutional Convention in 1787, which resulted in the writing of a new Constitution of the United States establishing a federal government. In the context of the times, the Constitution was a republican and liberal document.
Federalism is a mode of government that combines a general level of government (a central or federal government) with a regional level of sub-unit governments (e.g., provinces, states, cantons, territories, etc.), while dividing the powers of governing between the two levels of governments.
[40] In Europe, liberalism usually means what is sometimes called classical liberalism, a commitment to limited government, laissez-faire economics. This classical liberalism sometimes more closely corresponds to the American definition of libertarianism, although some distinguish between classical liberalism and libertarianism. [41]