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Representative democracy is a form of government founded on the principle of elected individuals representing the people, as opposed to autocracy and direct democracy.[1]
The representatives form an independent ruling body (for an election period) charged with the responsibility of acting in the people's interest, but not as their proxy representatives—not necessarily always according to their wishes, but with enough authority to exercise swift and resolute initiative in the face of changing circumstances. It is often contrasted with direct democracy, where representatives are absent or are limited in power as proxy representatives.
A representative democracy that emphasizes individual liberty is a liberal democracy. One that does not is an illiberal democracy. There is no necessity that individual liberties be respected in a representative democracy.
Today, in liberal democracies, representatives are usually elected in multi-party elections that are free and fair. The power of representatives in a liberal democracy is usually curtailed by a constitution (as in a constitutional republic or a constitutional monarchy) or other measures to balance representative power:
The term republic may have many different meanings. It normally means a state with an elected or otherwise non-monarchical head of state, such as the Islamic Republic of Iran or Republic of Korea. Sometimes in the US it is used similar to liberal democracy. For example, "the United States relies on representative democracy, but its system of government is much more complex than that. It is not a simple representative democracy, but a constitutional republic in which majority rule is tempered."[2]
In many representative democracies (Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, etc.), representatives are most commonly chosen in elections by a plurality of those who are both eligible to cast votes and actually do so. A candidate has a plurality when he or she has won more votes than any other candidate in the race, but not necessarily most (more than 50%) of the votes cast. This is not the case in Australia, where the elected representatives of the house of representatives are elected by a system of preferential voting and require the support of 50% or more voters in a single round to be elected. While existing representative democracies hold such elections to choose representatives, in theory other methods, such as sortition (more closely aligned with direct democracy), could be used instead. Also, representatives sometimes hold the power to select other representatives, presidents, or other officers of government (indirect representation)(Citation needed)
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The major problem with representative democracies is that voter apathy is more common than political interest. This often means that governments are in power without a mandate, suggesting that they do not have electoral legitimacy, or the right to rule, while in office.
Real-world representative democracies are not always that representative. Measures such as the Gallagher Index attempt to quantify the extent to which parliaments are representative. Voting based on local electorates tends to create a high degree of Stratified sampling which selects parliamentarians with centrist views. Radical views therefore are somewhat excluded from parliamentary debates much more than if parliamentarians were a random selection from the population.
Australia, unlike the United Kingdom and Canada, has adopted compulsory voting: citizens are required to register and vote in public elections. Those who do not vote are subject to a fine of AU$50 and or possible imprisonment, although this penalty rarely is executed. A voter is not required to cast a vote for a candidate and can cast what is known as an informal vote. Australia uses a single-round preferential voting system, in which each candidate is ranked in order of preference. For the House of Representatives, a successful candidate requires 50% or more votes to be elected. If no candidate has 50% or more votes, then the candidate(s) with the least number of votes is excluded and those votes are redistributed according to the voters' nominated preference. The Australian Senate is elected by a preferential Single Transferable Voting system of Proportional Representation.
In the 2010 election in the United Kingdom, voter turnout was 65.1% of the electorate, an increase from 61.4% in 2005. In the UK of late, there has been considerable discussion of how the electoral system might be reformed to increase its representativeness. Some significant proposals: