The people in a country need a way to keep themselves safe and provide goods and services to one another. Governments help adults make the rules we all live by and make sure those rules are followed. They also judge any conflicts between the rules.
When thinking about what government is, it’s important to remember that there are many different ways to organize a society. Those systems are called political systems, and they can range from the government of one person (an autocracy) to the government of a small group of people (an oligarchy) or the people as a whole (a democracy). Some of these political systems are very different from others. For example, a democracy can be a direct democracy (one in which everyone votes directly), or it can be an indirect democracy (in which the members of an electoral college vote for their preferred candidates).
In the United States, we have a representative democratic system. That means that a small number of people out of all the voters in a state or territory are elected to make laws for everybody else. This group is known as Congress. Congress is made up of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Each branch has its own job to do, and it has special powers that are not shared with the other branches.
These special powers are referred to as checks and balances, and they are designed to keep any one branch of the government from becoming too powerful. The founding fathers of the United States created this system when they wrote the Constitution. They based it on what they had learned from history. They knew that if one part of the government got too much power, it would cause big problems. To prevent this, they arranged the responsibilities of the various branches of the U.S. federal government into three separate areas: the legislative, executive, and judicial branches.
As you read this article, you’ll learn more about these different parts of the government and how they interact with each other. The most basic idea is that each of these branches has a special job to do, and it must be checked by the other two branches.
The checks and balances that we have in the United States are called checks and balances because each of the branches has a check on it. For example, when the legislature passes a law, the president has the right to veto it. If he does, the legislature can still pass it again, but it must be approved by two-thirds of both houses of Congress and the President’s signature to become a law. Similarly, the judicial branch can review the law and determine whether it is constitutional. If it is, the President signs it into law. If it isn’t, the judicial branch can send the bill back to the legislature with suggestions for changes. This is a type of “amendatory veto.” The judicial branch can also interpret the laws and determine their meaning.