The remainder of the surveyed countries are considered authoritarian regimes, such as North Korea, the Middle East states or other countries run by an autocrat. But not all representative democracies are the same. Some are parliamentary constitutional monarchies, such as the United Kingdom or the Netherlands, while others are representative republics like Germany or the United States. Even countries that are de facto dictatorships maintain mechanisms of representative democracy.
Russia comes to mind. And a representative democracy can either be liberal — where laws protect not only our human rights and other values, but also limit the power of our representatives — or illiberal, in which elected representatives, once in power, can more or less rule as they please. We have jobs to go to, kids to care for, the latest Apple products to salivate over.
Representatives can also aggregate the various interests of their constituents to shape laws and policy in a way that gives the greatest benefit to the most people. Help us fight for your rights! Donate For representative democracy to work properly, it is complemented by participatory democracy. This means that citizens, through civil society groups and other non-governmental organizations NGOs , are still able to communicate with and influence their government between elections.
NGOs fulfill a number of important functions, including informing people about matters of public interest, providing them with channels through which they can speak to their political representatives between elections, and holding the government to account when it breaks the law. The freedom of NGOs to carry out these functions and the freedom of people to associate with NGOs are vital components of liberal representative democracy.
That said, representative democracy is not without its drawbacks. It necessarily concentrates power in the hands of a few people, thereby giving them ultimate control over the form and substance of our laws.
Could legislation be crafted in a way that gives special benefits to representatives, their family or friends? 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. Those attracted to strong-man leadership see value in a president who can make policy with little or no consultation with the Congress or other elected bodies. As concerns about our institutions have grown, however, so has interest in alternatives. At the same time, militia groups, political entrepreneurs, and big-money interests are also pushing for changes to how the system operates.
They often want to move away from representative democracy, limit the power of the legislature, dismiss the professional civil service, rearrange the federal structure, and in some cases see an advantage in a strong-man leader.
I have to confess; I have trouble seeing us move in either direction. Yet while I see the value of direct democracy at the town level, as is practiced in parts of New England, I have trouble seeing how million people could make decisions on even major policy questions at the federal level. This, of course, is a system of authoritarianism you can find in various spots around the world; Russia, Turkey, the Philippines, and Venezuela come to mind.
The constitution ensures both majority rule and minority rights. The U. It is a representative democracy because the people, the source of its authority, elect individuals to represent their interests in its institutions.
The formation and function of the government is based on majority rule. The people, for example, elect their representatives by majority vote in free, fair, competitive, and periodic elections in which practically all adult citizens of the country have the right to vote.
A chief executive, the President, elected by the people, then enforces these laws. 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.
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