Keep that question in mind as we learn more about the different types of democracy. The Founders of the United States had to decide how much say the people would have in their government. They decided to balance both interests and choose a system where the people would select officials that would vote for them. The American people could have voted on laws and issues themselves instead of through a spokesperson.
These two systems are called a representative democracy and a direct democracy, respectively. A representative democracy is a system of government where citizens elect representatives to vote on laws on their behalf.
A direct democracy is one where citizens vote on every issue themselves. The key difference between the two systems is who is voting on laws, elected officials or the citizens. The first direct democracy was in Ancient Greece. In the capital city of Athens, all citizens would meet to debate and vote on the issues of the day. In that time, citizen status was restricted to adult white males, but still, political participation was open to everyone that was a citizen.
Assembly meetings were where citizens could pass laws and decrees by majority vote. The assembly also partially elected officials as the candidates were randomly selected by lottery. In contrast, representative democracies are based on the Roman system, which relied on leaders from different regions of the empire to be the voice of the people.
There were a number of citizen and tribal assemblies where ordinary people could discuss issues and laws. Because of this, and the influence of the Senate, the voices of the rich outweighed the interests of the poor. Each system of government played to the strengths of its nation.
In Greece, the citizens were well-educated, and power was central to the capital. The Roman empire was massive and very diverse in terms of language and culture. It would have been impossible to get the opinion of every citizen in a timely manner.
The systems developed by each empire reflected the structure of their societies. Today, as countries have larger populations, representative democracies are more common. Elected representatives are also difficult to reign in between elections, meaning they could pass laws that make us unhappy, or unfairly favor themselves or others, and we could have to wait years to hold them to account for it. Most of us would agree that democracy, while not perfect, is the fairest system of government.
It tends to do the best job of protecting the values most of us hold, like equality, human rights, and equal application of the law. And representative democracy is probably the best form of democracy to achieve this. Citizens still maintain ultimate control over their government through elections, during which they can choose the people and parties that represent them. Representative democracy gives people the advantages of democracy — having a say in the way they are governed, and choosing the people who govern them — without the onus of needing to study each law or policy initiative themselves.
Most of us have neither the time nor the inclination to do this. This means we maintain control over the direction of our country and what laws we live under. A few puppies may have to suffer through some uncomfortable photoshoots, but the drawbacks of representative democracy are far fewer than those of other systems of government.
And it does the best job of safeguarding our rights and values so that we are able to build and enjoy safe and free societies. A system of government in which citizens elect representatives who propose and vote on legislation or policy initiatives. But it delegates the responsibility of being expert on law and policy so citizens can go about their daily lives or choose not to pay much attention to the details.
Pretty rosy. Representative democracy is now the established form of democracy in the world, and the system of government most people live under. Liberties Liberties. What is a representative democracy? How does a representative democracy work? Which countries have a representative democracy?
Information Hub. More Stories See more stories. Representative democracy in the United States is constitutional because it is both limited and empowered by the supreme law, the Constitution, for the ultimate purpose of protecting equally the rights of all the people. The periodic election by the people of their representatives in government is conducted according to the Constitution and the laws made under it.
The votes of the majority decide the winners of the election, but the rights of the minority are constitutionally protected so that they can freely criticize the majority of the moment and attempt to replace their representatives in the next election. From time to time, there is a lawful and orderly transition of power from one group of leaders to another. In earlier autocratic governments, the unrestrained power of a king or an aristocracy had typically threatened liberty.
Constitution feared that a tyrannical majority of the people could pose a new challenge to liberty. Madison expressed his fear of majority tyranny in an October 17, , letter to Thomas Jefferson:.
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