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Is democracy the most appropriate name for a large-scale representative system such as that of the early United States? At the end of the 18th century, the history of the terms whose literal meaning is rule by the peopledemocracy and republicleft the answer unclear. Both terms had been applied to the assembly-based systems of Greece and Rome, though neither system assigned legislative powers to representatives elected by members of the dmos. As noted above, even after Roman citizenship was expanded beyond the city itself and increasing numbers of citizens were prevented from participating in government by the time, expense, and hardship of travel to the city, the complex Roman system of assemblies was never replaced by a government of representativesa parliamentelected by all Roman citizens. Venetians also called the government of their famous city a republic, though it was certainly not democratic.

When the members of the United States Constitutional Convention met in 1787, terminology was still unsettled. Not only were democracy and republic used more or less interchangeably in the colonies, but no established term existed for a representative government by the people. At the same time, the British system was moving swiftly toward full-fledged parliamentary government. Had the framers of the United States Constitution met two generations later, when their understanding of the constitution of Britain would have been radically different, they might have concluded that the British system required only an expansion of the electorate to realize its full democratic potential. Thus, they might well have adopted a parliamentary form of government.

Embarked as they were on a wholly unprecedented effort to construct a constitutional government for an already large and continuously expanding country, the framers could have had no clear idea of how their experiment would work in practice. Fearful of the destructive power of factions, for example, they did not foresee that in a country where laws are enacted by representatives chosen by the people in regular and competitive elections, political parties inevitably become fundamentally important institutions.

Given the existing confusion over terminology, it is not surprising that the framers employed various terms to describe the novel government they proposed. A few months after the adjournment of the Constitutional Convention, James Madison, the future fourth president of the United States, proposed a usage that would have lasting influence within the country though little elsewhere. In Federalist 10, one of 85 essays by Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay known collectively as the Federalist papers, Madison defined a pure democracy as a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, and a republic as a government in which the scheme of representation takes place. According to Madison, The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic, are: first, the delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater the number of citizens, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended. In short, for Madison, democracy meant direct democracy, and republic meant representative government.

Even among his contemporaries, Madisons refusal to apply the term democracy to representative governments, even those based on broad electorates, was aberrant. In November 1787, only two months after the convention had adjourned, James Wilson, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, proposed a new classification. [T]he three species of governments, he wrote, are the monarchical, aristocratical and democratical. In a monarchy, the supreme power is vested in a single person; in an aristocracyby a body not formed upon the principle of representation, but enjoying their station by descent, or election among themselves, or in right of some personal or territorial qualifications; and lastly, in a democracy, it is inherent in a people, and is exercised by themselves or their representatives. Applying this understanding of democracy to the newly adopted constitution, Wilson asserted that in its principles,it is purely democratical: varying indeed in its form in order to admit all the advantages, and to exclude all the disadvantages which are incidental to the known and established constitutions of government. But when we take an extensive and accurate view of the streams of power that appear through this great and comprehensive planwe shall be able to trace them to one great and noble source, THE PEOPLE. At the Virginia ratifying convention some months later, John Marshall, the future chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, declared that the Constitution provided for a well regulated democracy where no king, or president, could undermine representative government. The political party that he helped to organize and lead in cooperation with Thomas Jefferson, principal author of the Declaration of Independence and future third president of the United States, was named the Democratic-Republican Party; the party adopted its present name, the Democratic Party, in 1844.

Following his visit to the United States in 183132, the French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville asserted in no uncertain terms that the country he had observed was a democracyindeed, the worlds first representative democracy, where the fundamental principle of government was the sovereignty of the people. Tocquevilles estimation of the American system of government reached a wide audience in Europe and beyond through his monumental four-volume study Democracy in America (183540).

Thus, by the end of the 18th century both the idea and the practice of democracy had been profoundly transformed. Political theorists and statesmen now recognized what the Levelers had seen earlier, that the nondemocratic practice of representation could be used to make democracy practicable in the large nation-states of the modern era. Representation, in other words, was the solution to the ancient dilemma between enhancing the ability of political associations to deal with large-scale problems and preserving the opportunity of citizens to participate in government.

To some of those steeped in the older tradition, the union of representation and democracy seemed a marvelous and epochal invention. In the early 19th century the French author Destutt de Tracy, the inventor of the term idologie (ideology), insisted that representation had rendered obsolete the doctrines of both Montesquieu and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, both of whom had denied that representative governments could be genuinely democratic (see below Montesquieu and Rousseau). Representation, or representative government, he wrote, may be considered as a new invention, unknown in Montesquieus time.Representative democracyis democracy rendered practicable for a long time and over a great extent of territory. In 1820 the English philosopher James Mill proclaimed the system of representation to be the grand discovery of modern times in which the solution of all the difficulties, both speculative and practical, will perhaps be found. One generation later Mills son, the philosopher John Stuart Mill, concluded in his Considerations on Representative Government (1861) that the ideal type of a perfect government would be both democratic and representative. Foreshadowing developments that would take place in the 20th century, the dmos of Mills representative democracy included women.

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Democracy - Democracy or republic? | Britannica