A Concurrent Majority is a majority composed of majorities within various subgroups. As a system of government, it means that "major government policy decisions must be approved by the dominant interest groups directly affected ... each group involved must give its consent". There must be majority support within each affected group concurrently. As a political principle, it enables minorities to block the actions of majorities. In the United States, its most vocal proponents have tended to be minority groups. The concurrent majority was intended to prevent the tyranny of the majority that proponents feared might arise in an unlimited democracy by granting some form of veto power to each of the conflicting interests in society. Background Prior to the American Revolution, most governments were controlled by small minorities of ruling elites. Most of the population was completely disfranchised, even in countries like Switzerland whose governments (local, regional, and federal) were democratic by contemporary standards. The conception of government that materialized during the separation of the United States from Great Britain marked a movement away from such control toward wider suffrage. The problem of tyranny then became a problem of limiting the majority's power. United States Constitution Even so, the widening of the franchise caused concern. The framers of the United States Constitution, even while they reiterated that the people held national sovereignty, worked to ensure that a simple majority of voters could not infringe upon the liberty of the rest of the people. One protection was separation of powers, such as bicameralism in the United States Congress and the three branches of the national government: legislative, executive, and judicial. Having two houses was intended to serve as a brake on popular movements that might threaten particular groups, with the United States House of Representatives representing the common people and the United States Senate defending the interests of the state governments. The House was to be elected by popular vote, and the Senate was to be chosen by state legislatures. The executive veto and the implied power of judicial review, which was later made explicit by the Supreme Court of the United States, created further obstacles to absolute majority rule; with the rise of the Warren Court in the 1960s and its establishment of a precedent of one man, one vote, judicial review was used to strike down most of the obstacles to absolute majority rule by declaring such measures unconstitutional.