What is the difference between Direct and Representative Democracy?

Direct democracy is a type of democracy that represents the framework of what democracy meant when the concept was first presented to us by our forefathers. This theory implies that people get to choose who leads them from representatives to important policy matters.

This model is the type of democracy that invites and entitles its citizens to participate and make decisions. This democracy typically only works with a small population of people. Representative democracy, on the other hand, is the most common form of democracy.

The citizens choose their representatives, and the government is comprised of and run by these representatives. The role of the people, however, is limited to participating in the general elections. A representative democracy permits people to vote for those who make laws in the legislative assembly on behalf of their country's citizens.

Direct democracy is one that allows the full participation of the citizens in so many democratic processes. Citizens are allowed to form, decide, and make changes to the constitutional laws. Citizens are constitutionally empowered to remove or choose public officials. Direct democracy has been in existence for a very long time now, and it is still working in some countries today. For instance, Switzerland is one of the countries of the world that practices direct democracy. The various laws in Switzerland were at one time proposed by the citizens, meaning the citizens still have the right to propose and change laws. However, this has to be approved by the majority of the voters. In a representative democracy, the citizens are not the ones ruling or making laws for themselves but the representatives. Representative democracy is usually encouraged by countries with large populations. Here, the citizens are constitutionally empowered to choose their representatives through elections. The representatives are the ones to propose and make laws on behalf of the citizens.

When you say representative democracy, this means that there are different representatives that are available and people are going to vote for those representatives. The representatives will be in charge of voting on different policy initiatives. This is different from direct democracy wherein people will be directly voting on the policy initiatives that they want. They do not need representatives anymore to do it for them. Take note that direct democracy is considered to be more favorable to the people because, for everything that they vote for, they know that majority would always win. For representative democracy, these people will have their own biases that may affect the things that they would vote for.