Representative democracy

[4] Some political theorists (including Robert Dahl, Gregory Houston, and Ian Liebenberg) have described representative democracy as polyarchy.

The Roman model of governance would inspire many political thinkers over the centuries,[9] and today's modern representative democracies imitate more the Roman than the Greek model, 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.

In Britain, Simon de Montfort is remembered as one of the fathers of representative government for holding two famous parliaments.

[14] Later, in the 17th century, the Parliament of England implemented 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.

[17][18] 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.

[citation needed] Many historians credit the Reform Act 1832 with launching modern representative democracy in the United Kingdom.

The empirical research shows that representative systems tend to be biased towards the representation of more affluent classes to the detriment of the population at large.

[24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31] In his book Political Parties, written in 1911, Robert Michels argues that most representative systems deteriorate towards an oligarchy or particracy.