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Representative Democracy

Representative democracy is an indirect form of democracy, whereby a small subset of the demos--its "representatives"--rule on behalf of the larger group. The mechanisms typically used to select democratic representatives are elections. Representative democracy is sometimes seen as the second-best of direct democracy--the kind of democracy possible in the age of mass socities where face-to-face deliberation of all citizens at once is impossible--and more often described as an improvement over direct democracy, in that it allows for much needed mediation between raw preferences of the majority and policy outcomes.