Talk:Representative democracy

Misinformation
Misinformation? You are the one spreading misinformation. Not only Franklin, but Jefferson credited the Iroquois with more than a bit of credit for ideas used in the founding of our nation and form of government. See Forgotten Founders for one well researched source. William Pitt as well.

http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/6Nations/FF.html

Read Chapter Six, Self-Evident Truths:

http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/6Nations/FFchp6.html —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.5.153.215 (talk • contribs)

As to the following statement:

"Representative government was invented in the sixteenth century when Deganawida established the League of the Five Nations of the Iroquois in what is now New York State. The Iroquois model of representative government influenced English philosophers, as well as Benjamin Franklin, and inspired the Americans and French to create representative democracies.

There is no historical data to support virtually any claim of this statement. There is data to the contrary that it was "invented" in the 16th Century or by the Iroquois. There is no data supporting the idea that the Iroquois Constitution was implmented in the 16th Century, some scholars would put the dat to five Centuries earlier some later, or that it was a real representative democracy in the sense that each tribe member was able to elect the tribal elders. This statement is pure misinformation. If a case can be made for it we should remove it.

There is plenty of historical data to support this claim although it does contain several errors. Deganawidah was a Huron man (not one of the five tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy) who influenced Hiawatha, a Mohawk chief to go woth him to the leaders of the five warring tribes to negotiate peace. The eagle holding the arrows on our one dollar bill is from that incident where Deganawidah shows how one arrow alone will break while five together cannot be broken. See Forgotten Founders-Bruce E. Johansen, Exiled in the Land of the Free,Indian Givers-Jack Weatherford. Even the textbook on American Government sent to me by Houghton-Mifflan acknowledges the influence of the Iroqois Confederation on the Articles of Confederation-the basis for our Constitution.(pg 25) You are correct about the date, however. "Using a combination of documentary sources, solar eclipse data, and Iroquois oral history, Mann and Fields assert that the Iroquois Confederacy's body of law was adopted by the Senecas (the last of the five nations to ratify it) August 31, 1142."(Bruce Johansen)MrgnsmsMFV

Isn't representative democracy and modern democracy equal to a republic?

What would you call a type of democracy that has every candidate getting elected? Each of say ten candidates in each constituency would get a few or a lot of votes, then serve to represent those who voted for them when voting on issues. This would allow candidates to be truthful about their politics rather than joining one or other party in order to get elected. Annual elections would allow good public servants to rise at the expense of poor ones in a reasonable time. Pay would depend on votes. Voters would be paid a small amount to get a good turnout. And every voter would have ten representitives to take their ideas or problems to. Representitives would have ten times less work to do, freeing them up to have a job or run a business. Representitives could elect an executive to form a government, and change it at will to improve the workability of it. No hoo hah at elections, just information and voting, then business as usual. Maybe there is a name for this type of representitive democracy, but I don't know it.

Was Athenian democracy (as the first democracy) a representative democracy? Did decision-makers represent the interests of the people? If so, did it matter if the representatives were randomly selected or elected?

Athenian Democracy is what is known as Direct Democracy where a group of privileged citizens meet to make decisions. This is comparable to a congress without the other two branches and who do not represent anyone else but themselves. Women, slaves and those without property were excluded from consideration. This only works of course in a small place like the city state of Athens. MrgnsmsMFV

Can representative democracy include methods of selecting representative that are more impartial (and, therefore more "representative") than elections? It appears that the current article on representative democracy propagates misinformation and limited thinking on what "representation" and "democracy" are all about by limiting the idea to elections.

copied?
Not sure which came first, but a lot of this page is almost identical to this page: 

I think we should be careful in case this was plagarized from the original page.

Edit -- whoops, I take that back, I failed to see this quote at the bottom of their page: "This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Representative_democracy".". Sorry about that. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.91.233.149 (talk • contribs) 2005-12-08

"Constitutional democracy" listed at Redirects for discussion
The redirect [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Constitutional_democracy&redirect=no Constitutional democracy] has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at  until a consensus is reached. Jay 💬 06:44, 25 July 2023 (UTC)