page_title: Representative democracy
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Representative democracy / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Diagram of the US House of Representatives showing all 435 voting seats grouped by state. Largest-to-smallest states are shown in a generally left-to-right clockwise flow. - The 9 largest states have a majority of the seats/votes, with the other 41 having less than half. - The four largest states (CA, TX, NY &amp; FL) have more combined votes than 34 of the smallest states. - California by itself has more votes than 21 of the smallest states combined. - Texas by itself has more votes than 17 of the smallest states put together. These facts can be understood as a straightforward matter of larger populations requiring a greater number of seats to represent them, per the principles of representative democracy. What this image also illuminates is the converse situation, the problem of the Senate, where states are given two votes each regardless of the number of people that a single Senator represents. At the time the Senate was created, the most populous state (Virginia) had roughly 10 times as many people as the least populous state (Delaware). This imbalance has been greatly magnified to the current situation where the most populous state today (California) has nearly 70 times as many people as the least populous state (Wyoming). See Malapportionment. This Washington Post article from 2013 has a graph that shows how grossly imbalanced the Senate representation is: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/03/11/if-youre-from-california-you-should-hate-the-senate/. Seat apportionment presented in this diagram can be verified at this table.
context_page_description: Representative democracy, also known as indirect democracy or representative government, is a type of democracy founded on the principle of elected officials representing a group of people, as opposed to direct democracy. Nearly all modern Western-style democracies are types of representative democracies; for example, the United Kingdom is a unitary parliamentary constitutional monarchy, France is a unitary semi-presidential republic, and the United States is a federal presidential republic.
  It is an element of both the parliamentary and the presidential systems of government and is typically used in a lower chamber such as the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, or Lok Sabha of India, and may be curtailed by constitutional constraints such as an upper chamber. It has been described by some political theorists including Robert A. Dahl, Gregory Houston and Ian Liebenberg as polyarchy. In it the power is in the hands of the representatives who are elected by the people. Political parties are often central to this form of democracy because electoral systems require voters to vote for political parties as opposed to individual representatives.
context_section_description: The Roman Republic was the very first known government in the western world to have a representative government, despite taking the form of a direct government in the Roman assemblies. The Roman model of governance inspired many political thinkers over the centuries, and today's modern representative democracies imitate more the Roman than the Greek models because it was a state in which supreme power was held by the people and their elected representatives, and which had an elected or nominated leader. Representative democracy is a form of democracy in which people vote for representatives who then vote on policy initiatives as opposed to a direct democracy, a form of democracy in which people vote on policy initiatives directly. A European medieval tradition of selecting representatives from the various estates (classes, but not as we know them today) to advise/control monarchs led to relatively wide familiarity with representative systems inspired by Roman systems.
  In Australia it Simon de Montfort is remembered as one of the fathers of representative government for holding two famous parliaments. The first, in 1258, stripped the King of unlimited authority and the second, in 1265, included ordinary citizens from the towns. Later, in the 17th century, the Parliament of England pioneered some of the ideas and systems of liberal democracy culminating in the Glorious Revolution and passage of the Bill of Rights 1689.
  The American Revolution led to the creation of a new Constitution of the United States in 1787, with a national legislature based partly on direct elections of representatives every two years, and thus responsible to the electorate for continuance in office. Senators were not directly elected by the people until the adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913.  Women, men who owned no property, and blacks, and others not originally given voting rights in most states eventually gained the vote through changes in state and federal law in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. Until it was repealed by the Fourteenth Amendment following the Civil War, the Three-Fifths Compromise gave a disproportionate representation of slave states in the House of Representatives relative to the voters in free states.
  In 1789, Revolutionary France adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and, although short-lived, the National Convention was elected by all males in 1792. Universal male suffrage was re-established in France in the wake of the French Revolution of 1848.
  Representative democracy came into particular general favour in post-industrial revolution nation states where large numbers of citizens evinced interest in politics, but where technology and population figures remained unsuited to direct democracy. As noted above, Edmund Burke in his speech to the electors of Bristol classically analysed their operation in Britain and the rights and duties of an elected representative.
  Globally, a majority of the world's people live in representative democracies including constitutional monarchies and republics with strong representative branches.
caption: The U.S. House of Representatives, one example of representative democracy
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