The basis of modern democracy is the proposition that every adult person's judgment about the conduct of public affairs is entitled to be given equal weight with every other person's. The concept sprang originally from the Protestant Reformation, which declared that everybody was equal in his dealings with God. The political offspring of that religious declaration is now accepted everywhere in the world, at least in principle, except among diehard Leninists and conservative Muslims. In most places where it is practised, however, democracy is in a condition of arrested development. This is not what ancient Athenians meant by democracy.
Some countries do it differently.
The most clear-cut example is Switzerland's system of direct democracy. In Switzerland it is possible to insist, by collecting a modest number of signatures, that any law proposed by the government must be submitted to a vote of the whole people. Australia and some of the western parts of the United States also now use referendums in a fairly regular way. But elsewhere democracy is still stuck at a half-way house, as it were, in which the final word is delegated to the chosen few. One is the growing inadequacy of representative democracy.