A type of government in which the functions and powers exercised by that government are prescribed, limited, and restricted by law, usually in a written constitution.

==Limited government in the United States Probably the clearest example of limited government is in the United States, where the constitution both creates a structure of national government and enumerates the powers to which that government is entitled. The Constitution reserves certain powers for the Federal Government and precludes certain powers from the same; it also reserves certain powers for the State governments, and precludes other powers from them. Lastly, the 10th Amendment specifically states that The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Compare and contrast sovereignty in America to sovereignty in Britain

This contrasts strongly (and probably causally) with government in Britain, certainly at the time and arguably even in modern times, where government is limited by nothing more than convention.

The difference may be attributed to different conceptualizations of sovereignty. In the United States, sovereignty is thought to rest with the people; although one could argue that the Constitution is soveriegn in its own right, the Constitution has legal force primarily because of its ratification by the people; consequentially, the power to design the form of government - and thus sovereignty - must rest with the people, being the ultimate arbiter of the method of government, rather than the document that they approve); through the constitution, the people loan to the government certain powers.

In Britain, by contrast, sovereignty rests with the Crown and Parliament; power is delegated from these bodies as they see fit (q.v. the recent enthusiasm for devolution in Scotland, Wales and England's regions). Although there is a huge body of law and tradition in the UK that effectively creates an unwritten constitution, these laws are subject to arbitrary changes by the government at any time (q.v. the 2003 decision of the Blair government to abolish the office of the Lord Chancellor).

In America, the concept of limited government flows naturally from the asssumption of popular sovereignty: if the people are sovereign, then any powers they lend the government detract from their own freedom, and therefore should be limited. In Britain, the concept of limited government makes less sense: when the government is sovereign, then any powers they lend other sub-governments detract from their own freedom of action. As a consequence, even if British politicians expouse devolution as having the primary aim of bringing government closer to the people (a key concept of limited government, as discussed in Tocqueville's Democracy in America), and even if they succeed in that endeavour, their conceptualizaton of the flow of that power is very different to the thought process that lead to the hierachical model of government in the US. Devolution involves giving power to sub-entities closer to the people; this implies that the power is government's to give to people in the first place; in America, power is given to the government by the people. See also Lakoff's Moral Politics for more discussion on how conceptual systems can determine (or at least strongly affect) perception.