Politics of the United States

The United States is a federal republic in which the President of the United States, United States Congress, and United States federal courts share powers reserved to the national government.

The federal judiciary of the United States is one of the three co-equal branches of the federal government of the United States organized under the United States Constitution and laws of the federal government.

A presidency is an administration or the executive, the collective administrative and governmental entity that exists around an office of president of a state or nation.

A congress is a formal meeting of the representatives of different nations, constituent states, independent organizations, or groups.

Introduction: Crash Course U.S. Government and Politics by CrashCourse

At the same time, the federal government shares sovereignty with the state governments.

Sovereignty is understood in jurisprudence as the full right and power of a governing body to govern itself without any interference from outside sources or bodies.

HN: United States Political System by M. Elmore

The executive branch is headed by the President and is formally independent of both the legislature and the judiciary.

The cabinet serves as advisers to the President.

They include the Vice President and heads of the executive departments.

Legislative power is vested in the two chambers of Congress, the Senate and the House of Representatives.

A senate is a deliberative assembly, often the upper house or chamber of a bicameral legislature or parliament.

The judicial branch, composed of the Supreme Court and lower federal courts, exercises judicial power.

The judiciary's function is to interpret the United States Constitution and federal laws and regulations.

A constitution is a set of fundamental principles or established precedents according to which a state or other organization is governed.

This includes resolving disputes between the executive and legislative branches.

The federal government's layout is explained in the Constitution.

Two political parties, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, have dominated American politics since the American Civil War, although there are also smaller parties like the Libertarian Party, the Green Party, and the Constitution Party.

The American Civil War was a civil war in the United States fought from 1861 to 1865.

There are major differences between the political system of the United States and that of most other developed democracies.

These include greater power in the upper house of the legislature, a wider scope of power held by the Supreme Court, the separation of powers between the legislature and the executive, and the dominance of only two main parties.

The separation of powers, often imprecisely and metonymically used interchangeably with the trias politica principle, is a model for the governance of a state.

Third parties have less political influence in the United States than in other developed country democracies; this is because of a combination of stringent historic controls.

These controls take shape in the form of state and federal laws, informal media prohibitions, and winner-take-all elections, and include ballot access issues and exclusive debate rules.

Ballot access rules, called nomination rules outside the United States, regulate the conditions under which a candidate or political party is entitled either to stand for election or to appear on voters' ballots.

This multiplicity of jurisdictions reflects the country's history.

The federal government was created by the states, which as colonies were established separately and governed themselves independently of the others.

Units of local government were created by the colonies to efficiently carry out various state functions.

As the country expanded, it admitted new states modeled on the existing ones.