Just before the beginning of the book of Alma, all governmental power was held by one man—the king. He was the supreme ruler of the whole country, of everything. However, Alma divided up the powers. He kept for himself the responsibility of high priest and the head of the church, but he eventually gave to someone else the chief judgeship, and he also assigned to someone else the military, so they had a division of power. We do not know exactly how they tried to balance power, but we (in the United States) have a balance and separation of powers within our federal and state systems. Alma probably realized that for a democracy to work, for the voice of the people to really have a chance of surviving, all the power could not be concentrated in the hands of one person. Pahoran, as chief judge, then, probably did not have control over the military, over Moroni.
Without good people, a democracy is never going to work. This type of government causes a very real struggle for the voice of the people. Maybe that is one of the big themes of the whole Book of Alma—trying to make this experiment work.
We are so comfortable with the idea of democracy, the American Revolution, and how successful our efforts in this regard have been, that we forget what an enormous and risky undertaking it was. No one had ever tried to do something like what America did, and it was not easy to make it work.
We know that Pahoran was rather reluctant to take office, and was drafted into his position. When Nephihah stepped down, Pahoran did not even want to take the records, and he was not eager to get into this, but who would have been? They were in a war-torn situation. Pahoran was certainly not like Captain Moroni who was willing to charge right into things.