[dboreham]

There have been many books and articles on this over the years. Re-searching just now I found this one:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/07/how-ame...

e.g. "The Framers worried about demagogic excess and populist caprice, so they created buffers and gatekeepers between voters and the government. Only one chamber, the House of Representatives, would be directly elected. A radical who wanted to get into the Senate would need to get past the state legislature, which selected senators; a usurper who wanted to seize the presidency would need to get past the Electoral College, a convocation of elders who chose the president; and so on."

If I can track down any of the book titles I'll follow up.

[abvdasker]

I'd argue that many of these "features" really ended up being poorly conceived in the long run and caused all kinds of unforeseeable side effects. In particular they completely failed to anticipate the explosion in urban population which has caused the voting power of those in urban areas to be greatly diminished. As a result of the electoral college and winner-take-all systems the interests of urban voters are generally grossly underrepresented at the federal level with respect to population size.

The founding fathers were smart, but nobody in the 18th century was smart enough to anticipate the requirements of a modern electoral system. Their real mistake though was making the electoral system both incredibly complicated and very hard to change.

[Redoubts]

Well, at least 2 out of 3 of those components are failed designs. We may as well figure out a system that doesn't make dumb compromises instead.