Two Hundred Million Americans in Search of a Government

In this book, Schattschneider expands upon the theme of his better-known Semisovereign People, that the most important fact about democratic governments is one of sheer scale, i.e., the extraordinarily large numbers of people which are involved in running a democracy compared to any other form of government. This fact has critical consequences for how democracies work and how political debate is organized. It is not possible to understand fully why democratic politics looks the way it does unless you first come to terms with the arguments in this book.