The People Rule?

I recently went on a trip to the Newseum with a group of my 7/8 graders. We spent time in class discussing our freedom here in America and what we are allowed to do or not. The subject was our first amendment rights and the extent to which that applies to what we do and say. According to the information presented to us the average American citizen can easily name all 5 main characters from The Simpsons however had trouble naming the five rights given to us in the first amendment.


When we started studying government in the next section of our sociology textbook I was challenged with the question of who really rules our country? We live in a democracy which by definition says the people rule, however is this actually the case? When it comes to this question I went back to our time at the Newseum, put together some of the facts written about in the book and it got me thinking that the people don't actually rule but I do not think they really want to rule.

Our country has a free and open voting system, yet less than half of our citizens show up to voice their opinion. According to our textbook this results from a fairly difficult system of signing up to vote and a general indifference to the voting system that comes from people not believing their vote will truly make a difference.

Low voting rates contribute to a system that pluralists theorists would claim give individual citizens little or no direct influence on political decision making. I think this is the case in the United States. Government is less influenced by individuals and more by interest groups that lobby as a representation of a group of people. This as well as a well established system of checks and balances that exist in government keep the government from becoming too centralized.

So, do the people rule? In some ways yes and in some ways no. With the explosion of social media such as twitter and facebook many more citizens are using unique ways to have their voices heard. This may be the new face of interest groups and lobbying our government, however as it stands now this still is a small portion of a population who is less versed on their given freedoms and more likely to name someone who lives in a pineapple under the sea...