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Mixed government (or a mixed constitution) is a form of government that combines elements of democracy, aristocracy and monarchy, ostensibly making impossible their respective degenerations which are conceived in Aristotle Politics as anarchy, oligarchy and tyranny. The idea was popularized during classical antiquity in order to describe the stability, the innovation and the success of the republic as a form of government developed under the Roman constitution.
Unlike classical democracy, aristocracy or monarchy, under a mixed government rulers are elected by citizens rather than acquiring their positions by inheritance or sortition (at the Greco-Roman time, sortition was conventionally regarded as the principal characteristic of classical democracy).
The concept of a mixed government was studied during the Renaissance and the Age of Reason by Tomás Fernández de Medrano, Niccolò Machiavelli, Giambattista Vico, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Hobbes and others. It was and still is a very important theory among supporters of republicanism. Various schools have described modern polities, such as the European Union and the United States, as possessing mixed constitutions.
Plato found flaws with all existing forms of government and thus concluded that aristocracy, which emphasizes virtue and wisdom, is the purest form of government. Aristotle largely embraced Plato's ideas and in his Politics three types (excluding timocracy) are discussed in detail. Aristotle considers constitutional government (a combination of oligarchy and democracy under law) the ideal form of government, but he observes that none of the three are healthy and that states will cycle between the three forms in an abrupt and chaotic process known as the kyklos or anacyclosis. In his Politics, he lists a number of theories of how to create a stable government. One of these options is creating a government that is a mix of all three forms of government.
Polybius argued that most states have a government system that is composed of "more than one" of these basic principles, which then was called a mixed government system.Heinrich August Winkler (2012), Geschichte des Westens. Von den Anfängen in der Antike bis zum 20. Jahrhundert, Third Edition, Munich (Germany), , p. 179
According to some scholars, for example, Heinrich August Winkler, the notion also influenced the writers of the United States Constitution who based the idea of checks and balances, in part, upon the ancient theory.Winkler (2012), p. 301 The constitution of Britain during the Victorian Era with a Parliament composed of the Sovereign (monarchy), a House of Lords (aristocracy) and House of Commons (democracy) is a prime example of a mixed constitution in the 19th century.Heinrich August Winkler (2012), pp. 151ff This political system had its roots in two closely related developments in seventeenth-century England. First, a series of political upheavals—the Civil War (Puritan Revolution), the exclusion crisis of 1679–1681, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Second, an intense public debate about the best, most liberal and most stable form of government. Its main participants were John Milton, John Locke, Algernon Sidney and James Harrington. Their thinking became the basis of the radical Whig ideology. It "described two sorts of threats to political freedom: a general decay of the people which would invite the intrusion of evil and despotic rulers, and the encroachment of executive authority upon the legislature, the attempt that power always made to subdue the liberty protected by mixed government. The American Revolution revealed that this radical Whig understanding of politics had embedded itself deeply in American minds. ... Radical Whig perceptions of politics attracted widespread support in America because they revived the traditional concerns of a Protestantism culture that had always verged on Puritanism. That moral decay threatened free government could not come as a surprise to a people whose fathers had fled England to escape sin".Robert Middlekauff (2005 ), The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789, Revised and Expanded Edition, Oxford University Press, , pp. 51-52 18th-century Whigs, or commonwealthmen, such as John Trenchard, Thomas Gordon and Benjamin Hoadly "praised the mixed constitution of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, and they attributed English liberty to it; and like Locke they postulated a state of nature from which rights arose which the civil polity, created by mutual consent, guaranteed; they argued that a contract formed government and sovereignty resided in the people". So mixed government is the core of both the British form of modern-era democracy, constitutional monarchy, and the American model: republicanism.Winkler (2012), pp. 142ffMiddlekauff (2005), pp. 136ffCf. Thomas S. Kidd (2010), God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution, New York, N.Y., , pp. 7-8
The "father" of the American constitution, James Madison, stated in Federalist Paper No. 40 that the Constitutional Convention of 1787 created a mixed constitution. Madison referred to Polybius in Federalist Paper No. 63.Cf. Heinrich August Winkler (2012), pp. 290ff However, much more important was that "most" ideas that the American Revolutionaries put into their political system "were a part of the great tradition of the eighteenth-century commonwealthmen, the radical Whig ideology".Middlekauff (2005), p. 51
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