This article first ran on the Washington File in 1996.

The vote of the American people on November 5 to re-elect Democrat Bill Clinton to the presidency while allowing the Republicans to retain control of Congress may be confusing to overseas observers more familiar with parliamentary forms of government where this does not occur.

But the U.S. Constitution provides for divided government, if that is what the American people want. The principle is enshrined in the separation of powers between the executive, legislative and judicial branches, which the Founding Fathers of the U.S. system of government believed would deter any tendency toward tyranny.

The importance of the doctrine in American governance long has been stressed by constitutional lawyers, perhaps never more eloquently than by Louis Brandeis, one of the most renowned Supreme Court justices. Speaking in 1926, Brandeis said, "The doctrine of the separation of powers was adopted by the [Constitutional] Convention of 1787 not to promote efficiency, but to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power. The purpose was not to avoid friction but, by means of the inevitable friction incident to the distribution of government powers among three departments, to save the people from autocracy."

The concept was rooted in the American experience of colonial domination by Great Britain. The Founding Fathers did not want the new independent government to replace arbitrary power from London with arbitrary power from Washington.

Their concern was articulated by James Madison, one of the Founding Fathers, who wrote in The Federalist, "The accumulation of all powers -- legislative, executive and judicial -- in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."

To anyone's knowledge, none of the Founding Fathers ever used the word gridlock, but they clearly knew such a phenomenon could occur in a system based on separation of powers. But they were more concerned with government that was too powerful than government that was too weak.

As George Washington, the nation's first president, remarked in his farewell address, "It is important, likewise, that the habit of thinking in a free country, should inspire caution in those entrusted with its administration, to confine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres; avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another."

If the American people want strong government, they are free to elect a Congress and a president from the same party -- and even more so -- free to elect many lawmakers of the same ideological persuasion.

At crucial periods in American history, such as in 1932, when the country was facing the Great Depression, they have done so. In that year, the people not only elected a Democratic president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), in a landslide, but they also elected an overwhelmingly Democratic and liberal Congress. The Democrats won 313 seats to capture control of the House of Representatives that year and 59 seats in the Senate to gain control there. The mandate enabled FDR to pass a sweeping amount of New Deal legislation.

But there have been many other occasions in American history when the people voted to check the power of the president by electing a Congress dominated by members of a different party, and vice versa.

This is what happened this year on November 5. The Republican Party retained control of the Senate with an increased majority, and control of the House of Representatives with a reduced majority. The Democrats held onto the presidency with the re-election of President Clinton.

Experts point out, however, that although divided government has been commonplace since World War II, it most often occurred with Democratic control of one, or both houses of Congress, and a Republican president.

In 1994, however, under a Democratic president, the Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives for the first time since 1952 and control of the Senate for the first time since 1986. This division of power was ratified in this year's election.

As in 1994, however, the Republicans did not win a sufficient number of seats in the Congress to override a presidential veto of legislation, which requires a two-thirds vote of both bodies. Similarly, the president does not have enough members of his own party in Congress to pass his programs without building coalitions that must include at least some Republican support.

The American people, in effect, mandated that both parties work together in what President Clinton has called "the vital center," a phrase first coined by historian Arthur Schlesinger.

Many observers more familiar with parliamentary forms of democracy than with the U.S. system feel such brakes on the power of the central government inevitably leads to weak and inefficient government, neglecting to consider that this may be the popular will at particular times in history.

Most Americans believe a separation of executive, legislative and judicial powers has served this country well -- and not only Americans. An Englishman once wrote in a widely quoted book, "The principles of a free constitution are irrevocably lost when the legislative power is dominated by the executive." The Englishman was Edward Gibbon and the book was History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.