where did the idea of representative government first develop
ancient Athens
title: Representative democracy text: and which had an elected or nominated leader. Representative democracy is a form of democracy in which people vote for representatives who then vote on policy initiatives as opposed to a direct democracy, a form of democracy in which people vote on policy initiatives directly. A European medieval tradition of selecting representatives from the various estates (classes, but not as we know them today) to advise/control monarchs led to relatively wide familiarity with representative systems inspired by Roman systems. In Britain, Simon de Montfort is remembered as one of the fathers of representative government for holding two famous parliaments. The title: Representative democracy text: first, in 1258, stripped the King of unlimited authority and the second, in 1265, included ordinary citizens from the towns. Later, in the 17th century, the Parliament of England pioneered 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. Senators were not directly elected by the title: Representative democracy text: is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion. The Roman Republic was the first known government in the western world to have a representative government, despite taking the form of a direct government in the Roman assemblies. The Roman model of governance inspired many political thinkers over the centuries, and today's modern representative democracies imitate more the Roman than the Greek models because it was a state in which supreme power was held by the people and their elected representatives, title: The Life and Death of Democracy text: within the Christian Church, democracy came to be understood as representative democracy in this second phase. Contrary to what other sources have often suggested, Keane points out that the oldest roots of that democratic model are in fact undemocratic. The first parliament was not English, but Spanish. Keane locates the birth of representative parliaments in the cloisters of San Isidoro Church, in León, Northern Spain - the site where King Alfonso IX convened the first cortes in 1188 CE. Yet it took several centuries before the term representation began to be used in conjunction with democracy. The birthplace of talk title: Proportional representation text: individuals from a population to serve in a representative decision-making body. One of the earliest proposals of proportionality in an assembly was by John Adams in his influential pamphlet "Thoughts on Government", written in 1776 during the American Revolution: Mirabeau, speaking to the Assembly of Provence on January 30, 1789, was also an early proponent of a proportionally representative assembly: In February 1793, the Marquis de Condorcet led the drafting of the Girondist constitution which proposed a limited voting scheme with proportional aspects. Before that could be voted on, the Montagnards took over the National Convention and produced their own